The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [117]
Ishimara, S., Major Infantry, Japanese Army. That was the way he had signed it, relinquishing himself again to anonymity.
"Did you have a look at it, Wakara?" Dove had asked.
Wakara grinned, staring at the sand. His own translation was in his breast pocket now. Poor Ishimara, whoever he was. The Americans had looted his corpse, and some noncom had brought the diary back. No, Wakara thought, he was too much of an American himself to understand really the kind of things that had gone on in Ishimara's head. Would an American keep a diary, write in it an hour before an attack? The poor bastard Ishimara, dumb, dumb like all the Japanese. Wakara unfolded his translation, read it over again for a moment.
The sun was red in its setting tonight, red with the blood of our soldiers who died today. Tomorrow my blood shall be in it. This night I cannot sleep. I find myself weeping. I have thought achingly of my childhood, and I remember the boys, my school friends, and the games we have played. I think of the year I have spent with my grandparents in the prefecture of Choshi. I think, I am born and I die. I am born, I live, and I am to die, I think on this night.
I do not believe in the Emperor, His Most Exalted, I must confess it.
I am going to die. I am born, I am dead.
I ask myself -- WHY? I am born, I am to die. WHY? WHY? What is the meaning?
Wakara shrugged again. A thinker, a poet; there were many Japanese like him. And yet they died like anything but poets, died in mass ecstatic outbursts, communal frenzies. NAZE, NAZE DESU KA? Ishimara had written in huge trembling characters, WHY, WHY IS IT? and he had gone out and been killed in the river on the night of the big Japanese attack. He had fallen, shrieking, no doubt, a unit in an anonymous exalted mass. Who could comprehend it fully? Wakara wondered.
When he had been in Japan as a child of twelve, it had seemed the most wonderful and beautiful country he had ever seen. Everything was so small; it was a country built for the size of a twelve-year-old. Wakara knew Choshi where Ishimara had spent a year with his grandparents; perhaps he had even spoken once to Ishimara's grandparents. And in the peninsula at Choshi, in two miles, one could see everything. There were great cliffs which dropped several hundred feet into the Pacific, there were miniature wooded groves, as perfect, as tailored as emeralds, there were tiny fishing towns constructed of gray wood and rocks, there were rice paddies and mournful low foothills, and the cramped choked streets of the city of Choshi with its smells of fish tripe and human dung, the crowded bloody docks of the fishing wharves. Nothing went to waste. All the land had been manicured for a thousand years.
Wakara put out his cigarette in the sand and scratched at his thin mustache. It was all like that. No matter where you went, Japan was always beautiful, with an unreal finite beauty, like a miniature landscaped panorama constructed for a showroom or a fair. For a thousand years or more perhaps the Japanese had lived like seedy caretakers watching over precious jewels. They tilled the land, expended their lives upon it, and left nothing for themselves. Even when he was twelve years old he had known that the faces of the women were different from those of American women. And now in retrospect there was a curious detached wistfulness about the Japanese women as if they had renounced even the desire to think about joys they would never have.
Behind the beauty it was all bare, with nothing in their lives but toil and abnegation. They were abstract people, who had elaborated an abstract art, and thought in abstractions and spoke in them, devised involuted ceremonies for saying nothing at all, and lived in the most intense fear of their superiors that any people had ever had.
And a week ago a battalion of those wistful people had charged to their death with great terrifying screams. Oh, he understood, Wakara thought, why the Americans who had been in Japan hated the Japanese worst of all. Before the war they had been so wistful, so charming; the Americans had picked them up like pets, and were feeling the fury now of having a pet bite them. All the conversations, the polite evasions, the embarrassed laughs the Japanese had given them had suddenly assumed another meaning, had become malign once the war started. The Japanese to a man had been plotting against them. It was rot. Perhaps ten of the million or two million peasants who would be killed would have an idea of why they were being slaughtered. Even in the American Army the number was far greater.