“Were there incidents like that?”
Murayama smiled. “Not in our unit. That would’ve been suicide.” He flipped through the pages, looking for images of the more colorful characters known for their petty rebellion, and again the feeling of Yasushi’s proximity seized me. How much had I longed for this? I had lived with a notion of Yasushi as a grown man, but without any context he had defied imagination. Now I was glimpsing his world, the details of his surroundings supplying a hint of his voice, his face, his life, and the experience was so beguiling I found myself giving over to this reunion with my son.
At five o’clock, my husband’s Gustav Becker chimed, its sonorous report startling us. Seizing the moment to comment on the yellowing sky, I noted the quickening traffic flashing through the gaps in the wooden fence foretelling my husband’s return. To my relief, Murayama flipped to the album’s last pages, where he had pasted in his own snapshots. He lingered over these, locating each one—Singapore, Malaya, Philippines—identifying all his closest friends, explaining that Yasushi would’ve been in some of the images had anyone been able to coax the camera from him. “He loved that thing, thought he could be a photojournalist. These were his favorites.” The images were of small, sentimental things—an ant on a cigarette butt; a fish in a puddle held by an empty crab shell—but they’d captured what his eyes had seen and moved him to record, and I breathed, swallowing the lump that had come to my throat.
Murayama, noticing this, hastened to cheer me. He described their friendship, the epic arguments they’d enjoyed, sparked by their disagreements over the quality of an image, their technical points turning like empty spits in the heat of their rivalry. “What did we know about photography?” He laughed. “Still, by the end, he’d learned something,” he said, pointing out a few more of Yasushi’s photographs, mostly portraits, some exhibiting a clear development, a growing promise I could hardly bear to witness. I touched the album. Murayama all but leapt up. He slammed the album shut, his gaze darting from my hand to the wall, settling on the vase, the pale shape now burnished by the afternoon sun, and again I saw that peculiar look, cool and assessing but almost guilty now, and it struck me that he had come for something, perhaps to burgle me after all, and I quickly apologized, explaining that I had meant no harm, that his visit had been a gift, one for which I wished I had something to offer. “It’s nothing, but would you like to take some of Yasushi’s clothes?”
Murayama blinked. Then his face creased, stricken. Shaking his head, he muttered an embarrassed apology and stood up. Stuffing his album into his satchel, he thanked me again for my hospitality. “You never know,” he told me as he pulled on his gaiters and hoisted his satchel, his voice edged with a chattiness that rattled the house. “Tanaka was famous for pulling things off.” In fact, when he did show up, would I mind letting him know that he, Murayama, had looked him up?
I promised I would and unlatched the gate, asking if there wasn’t anything more I could do. Telling me that he’d already inconvenienced me sufficiently, he bowed deeply and stepped away, turning once to wave before dissolving into the evening crowd.
Returning to the room, I hastened to straighten up, gathering the chopsticks, nesting the teacup in the bowl. I wiped the table, swept the tatami, gently slipping the paper into my pocket. Closing the sliding glass doors, I locked them, vigorously testing the latch. On my way out, I stopped to wipe the vase. There in the depths of its womb was a photograph, its white shape stenciled against the dark, and a chill snaked up my spine. I picked it out. In the foreground was Murayama, his open smile revealing a sunny boy not yet browned by the tropical sun. A field spread out behind him, a few shrubs in the distance, the open meadow bisected by a diagonal line: a newly dug trench. Along the trench was a line of people, roughly clothed and blindfolded, their legs folded under them, their ankles and wrists bound by ropes tied to stakes hammered deep into the earth. Though diminished by distance, their faces were crisp, the ends of their blindfolds flapping around their open mouths contorted by their anticipation of the soldiers standing several meters behind them, bayonets unsheathed. Like the prisoners, the soldiers’ faces were also diminished but crisp, and as I stared, my eyes darting from the ferocious faces of these boys gripping their bayonets to the runny faces of the prisoners twisted in desperation, I realized that their expressions were in fact identical, both parties bound by the same fear, the attackers anticipating the same moment of piercing anticipated by the victims, and it was then that I registered that what I was looking at was not, as I had first assumed, an execution, but rather a training session, the line of shrubs not at all shrubs but a row of chairs fattened by decorated officers observing the performance. Two questions sprang at me: Why had Murayama left this picture hidden in this vase? And was this, like the others, Yasushi’s photograph? Then it dawned on me that perhaps this whole visit had been a ploy plotted perhaps by Yasushi himself to not only leak the incriminating image—wasn’t that what photojournalists did?—but also signal to me that he, though uninterested in presenting himself, had in fact survived.
This last thought seized my imagination, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed plausible. Wouldn’t it explain Murayama’s peculiar behavior, and hadn’t he, at the last moment, been careful to prepare me for Yasushi’s return? I brought the photograph closer, its faint chemical odor penetrating my nose. Yes, those were indeed officers, and that was definitely a row of training soldiers, one end eclipsed by Murayama’s head, the other end cut off by the photograph’s border, the last visible soldier a mere slice, one visible leg stepping forward, one visible arm raising the bayonet, his face, cocked and therefore visible, sending a bolt of shock through me. Yasushi.
Outside, the sky had cooled to a pleasant cobalt, and as the clacking footsteps of the passersby began to thin, one pair branched off to stop outside the gate: my husband. I gripped the photograph. Glancing about for a place to hide it, my gaze, like Murayama’s, alighted on the vase. I carefully lowered it image-side up so that its gray face would blend with the vase’s dark interior. I stepped back; my buckling knees folded me to the floor. Outside, the gate rattled, the rusty bolt catching as usual. Smoothing my skirt, I arranged myself, tugging my blouse, straightening my back, as the momentary quiet of the room, once again assailed by the cicadas, was swallowed up by the darkening summer sky.
TRAIN TO HARBIN
I once met a man on the train to Harbin. He was my age, just past his prime, hair starting to grease and thin in a way one might have thought passably distinguished in another context, in another era, when he might have settled, reconciled to finishing out his long career predictably. But it was 1939. War had officially broken out between China and Japan, and like all of us on that train, he too had chosen to take the bait, that one last bite before acquiescing to life’s steady decline. You see, for us university doctors, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We all knew it. Especially back then.