13



Lieutenant Mamiya's Long Story: Part II

*


What woke me was the metallic click of a rifle's safety being released. No soldier in
battle could ever miss that sound, even in a deep sleep. It's a- how can I say it? -a special
sound, as cold and heavy as death itself. Almost instinctively, I reached for the Browning
next to my pillow, but just then a shoe slammed into my temple, the impact blinding me
momentarily. After I had brought my breathing under control, I opened my eyes just
enough to see the man who must have kicked me. He was kneeling down and picking up
my Browning. I slowly lifted my head, to find the muzzles of two rifles pointed at my
face. Beyond the rifles stood two Mongolian soldiers.
I was sure I had fallen asleep in a tent, but the tent was gone now, and a skyful of
stars shone overhead. Another Mongolian soldier was pointing a light machine gun at the
head of Yamamoto, who was lying beside me. He lay utterly still, as if conserving his
energy because he knew it was useless to resist. All of the Mongols wore long overcoats
and battle helmets. Two of them were aiming large flashlights at Yamamoto and at me.
At first I couldn't grasp what had happened: my sleep had been too deep and the shock
too great. But the sight of the Mongolian soldiers and of Yamamoto's face left no doubt
in my mind: our tents had been discovered before we had had a chance to ford the river.
Then it occurred to me to wonder what had become of Honda and Hamano. I turned
my head very slowly, trying to survey the area, but neither man was there. Either they
had been killed already or they had managed to escape.

These had to be the men of the patrol we had seen earlier at the ford. They were few
in number, a nd they were equipped with a light machine gun and rifles. In command was
a ruggedly built noncom, the only one of the bunch to be wearing proper military boots.
He was the man who had kicked me. He bent over and picked up the leather valise that
Yamamoto had had by his head. Opening it, he looked inside, then he turned it up side
down and shook it. All that fell to the ground was a pack of ciga rettes. I could hardly
believe it. With my own eyes, I had seen Yamamoto putting the document into that bag.
He had taken it from a saddlebag, put it in this valise, and placed the valise by his pillow.
Yamamoto struggled to maintain his cool, but I saw his expression momentarily begin to
change. He obviously had no idea what had happened to the document. But whateve r the
explanation might be, its disappearance must have been a great relief to him. As he had
said to me earlier, our number one prior ity was seeing to it that the document never fell
into enemy hands.
The soldiers dumped all our belongings on the ground and inspected them in detail,
but they found nothing important. Next they stripped us and went through our pockets.
They bayoneted our clothing and packs, but they found no documents. They took our
cigarettes and pens, our wallets and notebooks and watches, and pocketed them. By turns,
they tried on our shoes, and anyone they fit took them. The men's arguments over who
got what became pretty intense, but the noncom ignored them. I suppose it was normal
among the Mongols to take booty from prisoners of war and enemy dead. The noncom
took only Yamamoto's watch, leaving the other items for his men to fight over. The rest
of our equipment-our pistols and ammunition and maps and compasses and binoculars-
went into a cloth bag, no doubt for sending to Ulan Bator headquarters.
Next they tied us up, naked, with strong, thin rope. At close range, the Mongol
soldiers smelled like a stable that had not been cleaned for a long, long time. Their
uniforms were shabby, filthy with mud and dust and food stains to the point where it was
all but impossible to tell what the original color had been. Their shoes were full of holes
and falling off their feet-quite literally. No wonder they wanted ours. They had brutish
faces for the most part, their teeth a mess, their hair long and wild. They looked more like
mounted bandits or highwaymen than soldiers, but their Soviet- made weapons and their
starred insignia indicated that they were regular troops of the Mongolian People's
Republic. To me, of course, their discipline as a fighting unit and their military esprit
seemed rather poor. Mongols make for tough, long-suffering soldiers, but they're not
much suited to modern group warfare.
The night was freezing cold. Watching the white clouds of the Mongolian soldiers'
breath bloom and vanish in the darkness, I felt as if a strange error had brought me into
the landscape of someone else's nightmare. I couldn't grasp that this was actually
happening. It was indeed a nightmare, but only later did I come to realize that it was just
the begin ning of a nightmare of enormous proportions.
A short time later, one of the Mongolian soldiers came out of the darkness, dragging
something heavy. With a big smile, he threw the object on the ground next to us. It was
Hamano's corpse. The feet were bare: some one had already taken his boots. They
proceeded to strip his clothes off, examining everything they could find in his pockets.
Hands reached out for his watch, his wallet, and his cigarettes. They divided up the ciga-
rettes and smoked them while looking through the wallet. This yielded a few pieces of
Manchukuo paper money and a photo of a woman who was probably Hamano's mother.

The officer in charge said something and took the money. The photo was flung to the
ground.
One of the Mongolian soldiers mus t have sneaked up behind Hamano and slit his
throat while he was standing guard. They had done to us first what we had been planning
to do to them. Bright- red blood was flowing from the body's gaping wound, but for such
a big wound there was not much blood; most of it had probably been lost by then. One of
the soldiers pulled a knife from the scabbard on his belt, its curved blade some six inches
long. He waved it in my face. I had never seen such an oddly shaped knife. It seemed to
have been designed for some special purpose. The soldier made a throat-slashing motion
with the knife and whistled through his teeth. Some of the others laughed. Rather than
government issue, the knife seemed to be the man's personal property. Everyone had a
long bayonet at his waist, but this man was the only one carrying a curved knife, and he
had apparently used it to slit Hamano's throat. After a few deft swirls of the blade, he
returned it to its scabbard.
Without a word, and moving only his eyes, Yamamoto sent a glance in my direction.
It lasted just an instant, but I knew immediately what he was trying to say: Do you think
Corporal Honda managed to get away? Through all the confusion and terror, I had been
thinking the same thing:
Where is Corporal Honda? If Honda escaped this sudden attack of the Outer
Mongolian troops, there might be some chance for us- a slim chance, perhaps, and the
question of what Honda could do out there alone was depressing, but some chance was
better than no chance at all. They kept us tied up all night, lying on the sand. Two
soldiers were left to watch over us: one with the light machine gun, the other with a rifle.
The rest sat some distance away, smoking, talking, and laughing, seemingly relaxed now
that they had captured us. Neither Yamamoto nor I said a word. The dawn temperature
dropped to freezing in that place, even in May. I thought we might freeze to death, lying
there naked. But the cold itself was nothing in comparison with the terror I felt. I had no
idea what we were in for. These men we re a simple patrol unit: they probably did not
have the authority to decide what to do with us. They had to wait for orders. Which
meant that we would probably not be killed right away. After that, however, there was no
way to tell what would happen. Yamamoto was more than likely a spy, and I had been
caught with him, so naturally I would be seen as an accomplice. In any case, we would
not get off easily.
Some time after dawn broke, a sound like the drone of an airplane engine came out of
the distant sky. Eventually, the silver-colored fuselage entered my field of vision. It was a
Soviet- made reconnaissance plane, bearing the insignia of Outer Mongolia. The plane
circled above us several times. The soldiers all waved, and the plane dipped its wing in
return. Then it landed in a nearby open area, sending up clouds of sand. The earth was
hard here, and there were no obstructions, which made it relatively easy to take off and
land without a runway. For all I knew, they might have used the same spot for this
purpose any number of times. One of the soldiers mounted a horse and galloped off
toward the plane with two saddled horses in tow.
When they returned, the two horses carried men who appeared to be high-ranking
officers. One was Russian, the other Mongolian. I assumed that the patrol had radioed
headquarters about our capture and that the two officers had made the trip from Ulan
Bator to interrogate us. They were intelligence officers, no doubt. I had heard that the

GPU was at work behind the scenes in the previous year's mass arrest and purge of
antigovernment activists.
Both officers wore immaculate uniforms and were clean-shaven. The Russian wore a
kind of trench coat with a belt. His boots shone with an unblemished luster. He was a thin
man, but not very tall for a Russian, and perhaps in his early thirties. He had a wide
forehead, a narrow nose, and skin almost pale pink in color, and he wore wire-rim
glasses. Overall, though, this was a face that made no impression to speak of. Standing
next to him, the short, stout, dark Mongolian officer looked like a little bear.
The Mongolian called the noncom aside, and the three men talked for a while. I
guessed that the officers were asking for a detailed report. The noncom brought over a
bag containing the things they had confiscated from us and showed them to the others.
The Russian studied each object with great care, then put them all back into the bag. He
said something to the Mongolian, who in turn spoke to the noncom. Then the Russian
took a cigarette case from his breast pocket and opened it for the other two. They went on
talking and smoking together. Several times, as he spoke, the Russian slammed his right
fist into his left palm. He looked somewhat annoyed. The Mongolian officer kept his
arms folded and his face grim, while the noncom shook his head now and then.
Eventually, the Russian officer ambled over to where we lay on the ground. "Would
you like a smoke?" he asked in Russian. As I said earlier, I had studied Russian in college
and could follow a conversation pretty well, but I pretended not to understand, so as to
avoid any difficulties. "Thanks, but no thanks," said Yamamoto in Russian. He was good.
"Excellent," said the Soviet Army officer. "Things will go more quickly if we can
speak in Russian. "
He removed his gloves and put them in his coat pocket. A small gold ring shone on
his left hand. 'As you are no doubt aware, we are looking for a certain something.
Looking very hard for it. And we know you have it. Don't ask how we know; we just
know. But you do not have it on you now. Which means that, logically speaking, you
must have hidden it before you were captured. You haven't transported it over there." He
motioned toward the Khalkha River. "None of you has crossed the river. The letter must
be on this side, hidden somewhere. Do you understand what I have said to you so far?"
Yamamoto nodded. "I understand," he said, "but we know nothing about a letter."
"Fine," said the Russian, expressionless. "In that case, I have one little question to ask
you. What were you men doing over here? As you know, this territory belongs to the
Mongolian People's Republic. What was your purpose in entering land that belongs to
others? I want to hear your reason for this."
"Mapmaking," Yamamoto explained. "I am a civilian employee of a map company,
and this man and the one they killed were with me for protection. We knew that this side
of the river was your territory, and we are sorry for having crossed the border, but we did
not think of ourselv es as having made a territorial violation. We simply wanted to
observe the topography from the vantage point of the plateau on this side."
Far from amused, the Russian officer curled his lips into a smile. " 'We are sorry'?"
he said slowly. "Yes, of course. You wanted to see the topography from the plateau. Yes,
of course. The view is always better from high ground. It makes perfect sense."
For a time he said nothing, but stared at the clouds in the sky. Then he returned his
gaze to Yamamoto, shook his head slowly, and sighed.
"If only I could believe what you are telling me! How much better it would be for all

of us! If only I could pat you on the shoulder and say, 'Yes, yes, I see, now run along
home across the river, and be more careful in the future.' I truly wish I could do this. But
unfortunately, I cannot. Because I know who you are. And I know what you are doing
here. We have friends in Hailar, just as you have friends in Ulan Bator."
He took the gloves from his pocket, refolded them, and put them back. "Quite
honestly, I have no personal interest in hurting you or killing you. If you would simply
give me the letter, then I would have no further business with you. You would be released
from this place immediately at my discretion. You could cross the river and go home. I
promise you that, on my honor. Anything else that happened would be an internal matter
for us. It would have nothing to do with you."
The light of the sun from the east was finally beginning to warm my skin. There was
no wind, and a few hard white clouds floated in the sky. A long, long silence followed.
No one said a word. The Russian officer, the Mongolian officer, the men of the patrol,
and Yamamoto: each preserved his own sphere of silence. Yamamoto had seemed
resigned to death fro m the moment of our capture; his face never showed the slightest
hint of expression.
"The two of you ... will... almost certainly ... die here," the Russian went on slowly, a
phrase at a time, as if speaking to children. "And it will be a terrible death. They ..." And
here the Russian glanced toward the Mongolian soldiers. The big one, holding the
machine gun, looked at me with a snaggletoothed grin. "They love to kill people in ways
that in volve great difficulty and imagination. They are, shall we say, aficionados. Since
the days of Genghis Khan, the Mongols have enjoyed devising particularly cruel ways to
kill people. We Russians are painfully aware of this. It is part of our history lessons in
school. We study what the Mongols did when they invaded Russia. They killed millions.
For no reason at all. They captured hundreds of Russian aristocrats in Kiev and killed
them all together. Do you know that story? They cut huge, thick planks, laid the Russians
beneath them, and held a banquet on top of the planks, crushing them to death beneath
their weight. Ordinary human beings would never think of such a thing, don't you agree?
It took time and a tremendous amount of preparation. Who else would have gone to the
trouble? But they did it. And why? Because it was a form of amusement to them. And
they still enjoy doing such things. I saw them in action once. I thought I had seen some
terrible things in my day, but that night, as you can imagine, I lost my appetite. Do you
understand what I am saying to you? Am I speaking too quickly?"
Yamamoto shook his head.
"Excellent," said the Russian. He paused, clearing his throat. "Of course, this will be
the second time for me. Perhaps my appetite will have returned by dinnertime. If
possible, however, I would prefer to avoid unnecessary killing."
Hands clasped together behind his back, he looked up at the sky for a time. Then he
took his gloves out and glanced toward the plane. "Beautiful weather," he said. "Spring.
Still a little cold, but just about right. Any hotter, and there would be mosquitoes. Terrible
mosquitoes. Yes, spring is much better than summer." He took out his cigarette case
again, put a cigarette between his lips, and lit it with a match. Slowly, he drew the smoke
into his lungs, and slowly he let it out again. "I'm going to ask you once more: Do you
insist that you really know nothing about the letter?"
Yamamoto said only one word: "Nyet."
"Fine," said the Russian. "Fine." Then he said something in Mongo lian to the

Mongolian officer. The man nodded and barked an order to the soldiers. They carried
over some rough logs and began to sharpen them with their bayonets, quickly turning
them into four stakes. Pacing off the distance between the stakes, they pounded them into
the ground with rocks at the four corners of a square. All these preparations took some
twenty minutes to complete, I guessed, but I had absolutely no idea what they were for.
The Russian said, "To them, an excellent slaughter is like an excellent meal. The
longer they take with their preparations, the more enjoyment they derive from the act.
Simply killing a man is no problem: one pistol shot and it's all over. But that would not
be"-and here he ran his fin gertip slowly over his smooth chin- "very interesting."
They untied Yamamoto and led him to the staked- off area. There they tied his arms
and legs to the four stakes. Stretched out on the ground, stark naked, Yamamoto had
several raw wounds on his body.
"As you know, these people are shepherds," said the Russian officer. "And shepherds
use their sheep in many ways: they eat their flesh, they shear their wool, they take their
hides. To them, sheep are the perfect animal. They spend their days with sheep-their
whole lives with sheep. They know how to skin them with amazing skill. The hides they
use for tents and clothing. Have you ever seen them skin a sheep?"
"Just kill me and get it over with," said Yamamoto. The Russian brought his palms
together and, while rubbing them slowly, nodded to Yamamoto. "Don't worry," he said.
"We will be certain to kill you. I guarantee you that. It may take a little time, but you will
die. There is nothing to worry about on that score. We are in no hurry. Here we are in the
vast wilderness, where there is nothing as far as the eye can see. Only time. All the time
we need. And I have many things I wish to tell you. Now, as to the procedure of
skinning: Every band has at least one specialist-one professional, as it were, who knows
everything there is to know about cutting off the skin, a man of miraculous skill. His
skinning is a work of art. He does it in the twinkling of an eye, with such speed and
dexterity you would think that the creature being skinned alive never no ticed what was
happening. But of course"- he took the cigarette case from his breast pocket onc e again,
shifted it to his left hand, and tapped upon it with the fingers of his right- "not to notice
such a thing would be out of the question. The one being skinned alive experiences
terrible pain. Unimaginable pain. And it takes an incredibly long time for death to come.
Massive hemorrhaging is what does it finally, but that takes time."
He snapped his fingers. The Mongolian officer stepped forward. From his coat pocket
he produced a sheathed knife. It was shaped like the one used before by the soldier w ho
had made the throat- slitting gesture. He pulled the knife from its sheath and held it aloft.
In the morning sun, the blade shone with a dull white gleam.
"This man is one of those professionals of whom I spoke," said the Russian officer. "I
want you to look at his knife. Closely. It is a very special knife, designed for skinning,
and it is extraordinarily well made. The blade is as thin and sharp as a razor. And the
technical skill these people bring to the task is extremely high. They've been skinning
animals for thousands of years, after all. They can take a man's skin off the way you'd
peel a peach. Beautifully, without a single scratch. Am I speaking too quickly for you, by
any chance?"
Yamamoto said nothing.
"They do a small area at a time," said the Russian officer. "They have to work slowly
if they want to remove the skin cleanly, without any scratches. If, in the meantime, you

feel you want to say something, please let me know. Then you won't have to die. Our
man here has done this several times, and never once has he failed to make the person
talk. Keep that in mind. The sooner we stop, the better for both of us."
Holding his knife, the bearlike Mongolian officer looked at Yamamoto and grinned.
To this day, I remember that smile. I see it in my dreams. I have never been able to forget
it. No sooner had he flashed this smile than he set to work. His men held Yamamoto
down with their hands and knees while he began skinning Yamamoto with the utmost
care. It truly was like skinning a peach. I couldn't bear to watch. I closed my eyes. When
I did this, one of the soldiers hit me with his rifle butt. He went on hitting me until I
opened my eyes. But it hardly mattered: eyes open or closed, I could still hear
Yamamoto's voice. He bore the pain witho ut a whimper- at first. But soon he began to
scream. I had never heard such screams before: they did not seem part of this world. The
man started by slitting open Yamamoto's shoulder and proceeded to peel off the skin of
his right arm from the top down-slowly, carefully, almost lovingly. As the Russian officer
had said, it was something like a work of art. One would never have imagined there was
any pain involved, if it weren't for the screams. But the screams told the horrendousness
of the pain that accompanied the work.
Before long, the entire skin of Yamamoto's right arm had come off in a single thin
sheet. The skinner handed it to the man beside him, who held it open in his fingertips,
circulating among the others to give them a good look. All the while, blood kept dripping
from the skin. Then the officer turned to Yamamoto's left arm, repeating the procedure.
After that he skinned both legs, cut off the penis and testicles, and removed the ears.
Then he skinned the head and the face and everything else. Yamamoto lost
consciousness, regained it, and lost it again. The screams would stop whenever he passed
out and continue when he came to again. But his voice gradually weakened and finally
gave out altogether. All this time, the Russian officer drew meaningless patterns on the
ground with the heel of his boot. The Mongolian soldiers watched the procedure in si-
lence. Their faces remained expressionless, showing neither disgust nor excitement nor
shock. They watched Yamamoto's skin being removed a piece at a time with the same
kind effaces we might have if we were out for a stroll and stopped to have a look at a
construction site.
Meanwhile, I did nothing but vomit. Over and over again. Long after it seemed there
was nothing more for me to bring up, I continued to vomit. At last, the bearlike
Mongolian officer held up the skin of Yamamoto's torso, which he had so cleanly peeled
off. Even the nipples were intact. Never to this day have I seen anything so horrible.
Someone took the skin from him and spread it out to dry the way we might dry a sheet.
All that remained lying on the ground was Yamamoto's corpse, a bloody red lump of
meat from which every trace of skin had been removed. The most painful sight was the
face. Two large white eyeballs stared out from the red mass of flesh. Teeth bared, the
mouth stretched wide open as if in a shout. Two little holes were all that remained where
the nose had been removed. The ground was a sea of blood.
The Russian officer spit on the ground and looked at me. Then he took a handkerchief
from his pocket and wiped his mouth. "The fellow really didn't know anything, did he?"
he said, putting the handkerchief back. His voice sounded somewhat flatter than it had
before. "If he had known, he would have talked. Pity. But in any case, the man was a
professional. He was bound to have an ugly death sooner or later. Ah, well, can't be

helped. And if he knew nothing, there's no way that you could know anything."
He put a cigarette between his lips and struck a match. "Which means that you are no
longer of any use to us. Not worth torturing for informa tion. Not worth keeping alive as a
prisoner. We want to dispose of this affair in the utmost secrecy. There could be
complications if we brought you back to Ulan Bator. The best thing, of course, would be
to put a bullet in your brain here and now, then bury you or burn you and throw your
ashes into the Khalkha. That would be a simple end to the matter. Don't you agree?" He
fixed his eyes on mine. I continued to pretend that I could not understand him. "You
don't understand Russian, I suppose. It's a waste of time to spell this out to you. Ah, well.
I might as well be talking to myself. So hear me out. In any case, I have good news for
you. I have decided not to kill you. Think of this as my own small expression of pen-
itence for having pointlessly killed your friend in spite of myself. We've all had our fill
of killing this morning. Once a day is more than enough.
And so I will not kill you. Instead, I will give you a chance to survive. If all goes
well, you may even come out of this alive. The chances of that happening are not good,
of course. Perhaps nonexistent. But a chance is a chance. At least it is far better than
being skinned alive. Don't you agree?"
He raised his hand and summoned the Mongolian officer. With great care, the man
had been washing his knife with water from a canteen and had just finished sharpening it
on a whetstone. The soldiers had laid out the pieces of Yamamoto's skin and were
standing by the m, discussing something. They seemed to be exchanging opinions on the
finer points of the skinner's technique. The Mongolian officer put his knife in its
scabbard and then into the pocket of his coat before approaching us. He looked me in the
face for a moment, then turned to his fellow officer. The Russian spoke a few short
Mongolian phrases to him, and without expression the man nodded. A soldier brought
two horses for them.
"We'll be going back to Ulan Bator now," the Russian said to me. "I hate to return
empty- handed, but it can't be helped. Win some, lose some. I hope my appetite comes
back by dinnertime, but I rather doubt it will."
They mounted their horses and left. The plane took off, became a silver speck in the
western sky, then disappeared alto gether, leaving me alone with the Mongolian soldiers
and their horses.
They set me on a horse and lashed me to the saddle. Then, in forma tion, we moved
out to the north. The soldier just in front of me kept singing some monotonous melody in
a voice that was barely audible. Aside from that, there was nothing to be heard but the
dry sound of the horses' hooves kicking up sand. I had no idea where they were taking
me or what they were going to do to me. All I knew was that to them, I was a superfluous
being o f no value whatever. Over and over in my head I repeated to myself the words of
the Russian officer. He had said he would not kill me. He would not kill me, but my
chances of surviving were almost nonexistent. What could this mean? It was too vague
for me to grasp in any concrete way. Perhaps they were going to use me in some kind of
horrible game. They wouldn't simply dispatch me, because they planned to enjoy the
dreadful contrivance at their leisure.
But at least they hadn't killed me. At least they hadn't skinned me alive like
Yamamoto. I might not be able to avoid being killed in the end, but not like that. I was
alive for now; I was still breathing. And if what the Russian officer had said was true, I

would not be killed immediately. The more time that lay between me and death, the more
chance I had to sur vive. It might be a minuscule chance, but all I could do was cling to it.
Then, all of a sudden, the words of Corporal Honda flared to life again in my brain:
that strange prognostication of his that I would not die on the continent. Even as I sat
there, tied to the saddle, the skin of my naked back burning in the desert sun, I repeatedly
savored every syllable that he had spoken. I let myself dwell on his expression, his
intonation, the sound of each word. And I resolved to believe him from the bottom of my
heart. No, no, I was not going to lie down and die in a place like this! I would come out
of this alive! I would tread my native soil once again!
We traveled north for two hours or more, coming to a stop near a Lamaist devotional
mound. These stone markers, called oboo, serve both as the guardian deity for travelers
and as valuable signposts in the desert. Here the men dismounted and untied my ropes.
Supporting my weight from either side, two of them led me a short distance away. I
figured that this was where I would be killed. A well had been dug into the earth here.
The mouth of the well was surrounded by a three- foot- high stone curb. They made me
kneel down beside it, grabbed my neck from behind, and forced me to look inside. I
couldn't see a thing in the solid darkness. The noncom with the boots found a fist-sized
rock and dropped it into the well. Some time later came the dry sound of stone hitting
sand. So the well was a dry one, apparently. It had once served as a well in the desert, but
it must have dried up long before, owing to a movement of the subterranean vein of
water. Judging from the time it took the stone to hit bottom, it seemed to be fairly deep.
The noncom looked at me with a big grin. Then he took a large auto matic pistol from
the leather holster on his belt. He released the safety and fed a bullet into the chamber
with a loud click. Then he put the muzzle of the gun against my head.
He held it there for a long time but did not pull the trigger. Then he slowly lowered
the gun and raised his left hand, pointing toward the well. Licking my dry lips, I stared at
the gun in his fist. What he was trying to tell me was this: I had a choice between two
fates. I could have him shoot me now-just die and get it over with. Or I could jump into
the well. Because it was so deep, if I landed badly I might be killed. If not, I would die
slowly at the bottom of a dark hole. It finally dawned on me that this was the chance the
Russian officer had spoken of. The Mongolian noncom pointed at the watch that he had
taken from Yamamoto and held up five fingers. He was giving me five seconds to decide.
When he got to three, I stepped onto the well curb and leaped inside. I had no choice. I
had hoped to be able to cling to the wall and work my way down, but he gave me no time
for that. My hands missed the wall, and I tumbled down.
It seemed to take a very long time for me to hit bottom. In reality, it could not have
been more than a few seconds, but I do recall thinking about a great many things on my
way down. I thought about my hometown, so far away. I thought about the girl I slept
with just once before they shipped me out. I thought about my parents. I recall feeling
grateful that I had a younger sister and not a brother: even if I was killed, they would still
have her and not have to worry about her being taken by the army. I thought about rice
cakes wrapped in oak leaves. Then I slammed into dry ground and lost consciousness for
a moment. It felt as if all the air inside me had burst through the walls of my body. I
thudded against the well bottom like a sandbag.
It truly was just a moment that I lost consciousness from the impact, I believe. When I
came to, I felt some kind of spray hitting me. At first I thought it was rain, but I was

wrong. It was urine. The Mongolian soldiers were all peeing on me where I lay in the
bottom of the well. I looked up to see them in silhouette far above me, taking turns
coming to the edge of the round hole to pee. There was a terrible unreality to the sight,
like a drug- induced hallucination. But it was real. I was really in the bottom of the well,
and they were spraying me with real pee. Once they had finished, someone shone a
flashlight on me. I heard them laughing. And then they disappeared from the edge of the
hole. After that, everything sank into a deep silence.
For a while, I thought it best to lie there facedown, waiting to see if they would come
back. But after twenty minutes had gone by, then thirty (as far as I could tell without a
watch), they did not come back. They had gone away and left me, it seemed. I had been
abandoned at the bottom of a well in the middle of the desert. Once it was clear that they
would not be returning, I decided to check myself over for injuries. In the darkness, this
was no easy feat. I couldn't see my own body. I couldn't tell with my own eyes what
condition it was in. I could only resort to my perceptions, but I could not be sure that the
perceptions I was experiencing in the darkness were accurate. I felt that I was being
deceived, deluded. It was a very strange feeling.
Little by little, though, and with great attention to detail, I began to grasp my
situation. The first thing I realized was that I had been extremely lucky. The bottom of
the well was relatively soft and sandy. If it hadn't been, then the impact of falling such a
distance would have bro ken every bone in my body. I took one long, deep breath and
tried to move. First I tried moving my fingers. They responded, although somewhat
feebly. Then I tried to raise myself to a sitting position on the earthen surface, but this I
was unable to do. My body felt as if it had lost all sensation. My mind was fully
conscious, but there was something wrong with the connection between my mind and my
body. My mind would decide to do something, but it was unable to convert the thought
into muscular activity. I gave up and, for a while, lay there quietly in the dark.
Just how long I remained still I have no idea. But little by little, my perceptions began
to return. And along with the recovery of my percep tions, naturally enough, came the
sensation of pain. Intense pain. Almost certainly, my leg was broken. And my shoulder
might be dislocated or, perhaps, if luck was against me, even broken.
I lay still, enduring the pain. Before I knew it, tears were streaming down my cheeks-
tears of pain and, even more, tears of despair. I don't think you will ever be able to
understand what it is like -the utter lone liness, the feeling of desperation-to be abandoned
in a deep well in the middle of the desert at the edge of the world, overcome with intense
pain in total darkness. I went so far as to regret that the Mongolian noncom had not
simply shot me and gotten it over with. If I had been killed that way, at least they would
have been aware of my death. If I died here, however, it would be a truly lonely death, a
death of no concern to anyone, a silent death.
Now and then, I heard the sound of the wind. As it moved across the surface of the
earth, the wind made an uncanny sound at the mouth of the well, a sound like the moan of
a woman in tears in a far -off world. That world and this were joined by a narrow shaft,
through which the woman's voice reached me here, though only at long, irregular
intervals. I had been left all alone in deep silence and even deeper darkness.
Enduring the pain, I reached out to touch the earthen floor around me. The well
bottom was flat. It was not very wide, maybe five or five and a half feet. As I was
groping the ground, my hand suddenly came upon a hard, sharp object. In reflexive fear, I

drew my hand back, but then slowly and carefully I reached out toward the thing. Again
my fingers came in contact with the sharp object. At first I thought it was a tree branch,
but soon eno ugh I realized I was touching bones. Not human bones, but those of a small
animal, which had been scattered at random, either by the passage of time or by my fall.
There was nothing else at the bottom of the well, just sand: fine and dry.
Next I ran my palm over the wall. It seemed to be made of thin, flat stones. As hot as
the desert surface became in daytime, that heat did not penetrate to this world
belowground. The stones had an icy chill to them. I ran my hand over the wall,
examining the gaps between stones. If I could get a foothold there, I might be able to
climb to the surface. But the gaps turned out to be too narrow for that, and in my battered
state, climbing seemed all but impossible.
With a tremendous effort, I dragged myself closer to the wall and raised myself
against it, into a sitting position. Every move made my leg and shoulder throb as if they
had been stuck with hundreds of thick needles. For a while after that, each breath made
me feel that my body might crack apart. I touched my shoulder and realized it was hot
and swollen.



How much time went by after that I do not know. But at one point some thing
happened that I would never have imagined. The light of the sun shot down from the
opening of the well like some kind of revelation. In that instant, I could see everything
around me. The well was filled with brilliant light. A flood of light. The brightness was
almost stifling: I could hardly breathe. The darkness and cold were swept away in a
moment, and warm, gentle sunlight enveloped my naked body. Even the pain I was feel-
ing seemed to be blessed by the light of the sun, which now warmly illu minated the white
bones of the small animal beside me. These bones, which could have been an omen of my
own impending fate, seemed in the sunlight more like a comforting companion. I could
see the stone walls that encircled me. As long as I remained in the light, I was able to
forget about my fear and pain and despair. I sat in the dazzling light in blank amazement.
Then the light disappeared as s uddenly as it had come. Deep darkness covered everything
once again. The whole interval had been extremely short. In terms of the clock, it must
have lasted ten or, at the most, fifteen seconds. No doubt, because of the angles involved,
this was all the sun could manage to shine straight down to the bottom of the hole in any
single day. The flood of sunlight was gone before I could begin to comprehend its
meaning.
After the light faded, I found myself in an even deeper darkness than before. I was all
but unable to move. I had no water, no food, not a scrap of clothing on my body. The
long afternoon went by, and night came, when the temperature plunged. I could hardly
sleep. My body craved sleep, but the cold pricked my skin like a thousand tiny thorns. I
fe lt as if my life's core was stiffening and dying bit by bit. Above me, I could see stars
frozen in the sky. Terrifying numbers of stars. I stared up at them, watching as they
slowly crept along. Their movement helped me ascertain that time was continuing to flow
on. I slept for a short while, awoke with the cold and pain, slept a little more, then woke
again.
Eventually, morning came. From the round mouth of the well, the sharp pinpoints of

starlight gradually began to fade. Still, even after dawn broke, the stars did not disappear
completely. Faint almost to the point of imperceptibility, they continued to linger there,
on and on. To slake my thirst, I licked the morning dew that clung to the stone wall. The
amount of water was minuscule, of course, but to me it tasted like a bounty from heaven.
The thought crossed my mind that I had had neither food nor water for an entire day. And
yet I had no sense of hunger.
I remained there, still, in the bottom of the hole. It was all I could do. I couldn't even
think , so profound were my feelings of loneliness and despair. I sat there doing nothing,
thinking nothing. Unconsciously, however, I waited for that ray of light, that blinding
flood of sunlight that poured straight down to the bottom of the well for one tin y fraction
of the day. It must have been a phenomenon that occurred very close to noon, when the
sun was at the highest point in the sky and its light struck the surface of the earth at right
angles. I waited for the coming of the light and for nothing else. There was nothing else I
could wait for.
A very long time went by, it seems. At some point I drifted into sleep. By the time I
sensed the presence of somethin g and woke, the light was already there. I realized that I
was being enveloped once again by that overwhelming light. Almost unconsciously, I
spread open both my hands and received the sun in my palms. It was far stronger than it
had been the first time. And it lasted far longer than it had then. At least it felt that way to
me. In the light, tears poured out of me. I felt as if all the fluids of my body might turn
into tears and come streaming from my eyes, that my body itself might melt away like
this. If it could have happened in the bliss of this marvelous light, even death would have
been no threat. Indeed, I felt I wanted to die. I had a marvelous sense of oneness, an over -
whelming sense of unity. Yes, that was it: the true meaning of life resided in that light
that lasted for however many seconds it was, and I felt I ought to die right then and there.
But of course, before anything could happen, the light was gone. I was still there, in
the bottom of that miserable well. Darkness and cold reasserted their grip on me, as if to
declare that the light had never existed at all. For a long time, I simply remained huddled
where I was, my face bathed in tears. As if beaten down by some huge power, I was
unable to do-or even to think- anything at all, unable to feel even my own physical
existence. I was a dried-up carcass, the cast-off shell of an insect. But then, once again,
into the empty room of my mind, returned the prophecy of Corporal Honda: I would not
die on the continent. Now, after the light had come and gone, I found myself able to
believe his prophecy. I could believe it now because, in a place where I should have died,
and at a time when I should have died, I had been unable to die. It was not that I would
not die: I could not die. Do you understand what I am saying, Mr. Okada? Whatever
heavenly grace I may have enjoyed until that moment was lost forever.
At this point in his story, Lieutenant Mamiya looked at his watch. "And as you can
see," he added softly, "here I am." He shook his head as if trying to sweep away the
invisible threads of memory. "Just as Mr. Honda had said, I did not die on the continent.
And of the four of us who went there, I have lived the longest."
I nodded in response.
"Please forgive me for talking on at such length. It must have been very boring for
you, listening to a useless old man chatter on about the old days." Lieutenant Mamiya
shifted his position on the sofa. "My goodness, I'll be late for my train if I stay any
longer."

I hastened to restrain him. "Please don't end your story there," I said. "What
happened after that? I want to hear the rest."
He looked at me for a moment.
"How would this be, then?" he asked. "I really am running late, so why don't you
walk with me to the bus stop? I can probably give you a quick summary along the way."
I left the house with him and walked to the bus stop.
"On the third morning, I was saved by Corporal Honda. He had sensed that the
Mongols were coming for us that night, slipped out of the tent, and remained in hiding all
that time. He had taken the document from Yamamoto's bag with him. He did this
because our number one priority was to see to it that the document not fall into enemy
hands, no matter how great the sac rifice we had to make. No doubt you are wondering
why, if he realized that the Mongols were coming, Corporal Honda ran away by himself
instead of waking the rest of us so that we could es cape together. The simple fact of the
matter is that we had no hope of winning in such a situation. They knew that we were
there. It was their territory. They had us far outnumbered and outgunned. It would have
been the simplest thing in the world for them to find us, kill us, and take the document.
Given the situation, C orporal Honda had no choice but to escape by himself. On the
battlefield, his actions would have been a clear case of deserting under fire, but on a
special assignment like ours, the most important thing is resourcefulness.
"He saw everything that happened. He watched them skinning Yamamoto. He saw
the Mongolian soldiers take me away. But he no longer had a horse, so he could not
follow immediately. He had to come on foot. He dug up the extra supplies that we had
buried in the desert, and there he buried the document. Then he came after me. For him to
find me down in the well, though, required a tremendous effort. He didn't even know
which direction we had taken." "How did he find the well?" I asked.
"I don't know," said Lieutenant Mamiya. "He didn't say muc h about that. He just
knew, I'd say. When he found me, he tore his clothing into strips and made a long rope.
By then, I was practically unconscious, which made it all the more difficult for him to
pull me up. Then he managed to find a horse and put me on it. He took me across the
dunes, across the river, and to the Manchukuo Army outpost. There they treated my
wounds and put me on a truck sent out by headquarters. I was taken to the hospital in
Hailar."
"What ever happened to that document or letter or whatever it was?" "It's probably
still there, sleeping in the earth near the Khalkha River. For Corporal Honda and me to go
all the way back and dig it up would have been out of the question, nor could we find any
reason to make such an effort. We arrived at the conclusion that such a thing should
never have existed in the first place. We coordinated our stories for the army's
investigation. We decided to insist that we had heard nothing about any document.
Otherwise, they probably would have held us responsible for not bringing it back from
the desert. They kept us in separate rooms, under strict guard, supposedly for medical
treatment, and they ques tioned us every day. All these high- ranking officers would come
and make us tell our stories over and over again. Their questions were meticulous, and
very clever. But they seemed to believe us. I told them every little detail of what I had
experienced, being careful to omit anything I knew about the document. Once they got it
all down, they warned me that this was a top-secret matter that would not appear in the
army's formal records, that I was never to mention it to anyone, and that I would be se-

verely punished if I did. Two weeks later, I was sent back to my original post, and I
believe that Corporal Honda was also returned to his home unit."
"One thing is still not clear to me," I said. "Why did they go to all the trouble of
bringing Mr. Honda from his unit for this assignment?"
"He never said much to me about that. He had probably been forbid den to tell
anyone, and I suspect that he thought it would be better for me not to know. Judging from
my conversations with him, though, I imagine there was some kind of personal
relationship between him and the man they called Yamamoto, something that had to do
with his special powers. I had often heard that the army had a unit devoted to the study of
the occult. They supposedly gathered people with these spiritual or psychokinetic powers
from all over the country and conducted exper iments on them. I suspect that Mr. Honda
met Yamamoto in that connection. In any case, without those powers of his, Mr. Honda
would never have been able to find me in the well and guide me to the exact location of
the Manchukuo Army outpost. He had neither map nor compass, yet he was able to head
us straight there without the slightest uncertainty. Common sense would have told you
that such a thing was impossible. I was a professional mapmaker, and I knew the
geography of that area quite well, but I could never have done what he did. These powers
of Mr. Honda were probably what Yamamoto was looking to him for."
We reached the bus stop and waited.
"Certain things will always remain as riddles, of course," said Lieutenant Mamiya.
"There are many things I still don't understand. I still wonder who that lone Mongolian
officer was who met us in the desert. And I wonder what would have happened if we had
managed to bring that document back to headquarters. Why did Yamamoto not simply
leave us on the right bank of the Khalkha and cross over by himself? He would have been
able to move around far more freely that way. Perhaps he had been planning to use us as
a decoy for the Mongolian troops so that he could escape alone. It certainly is
conceivable. Perhaps Corporal Honda realized this from the start and that was why he
merely stood by while the Mongolians killed him.
"In any case, it was a very long time after that before Corporal Honda and I had an
opportunity to meet again. We were separated from the moment we arrived in Hailar and
were forbidden to speak or even to see each other. I had wanted to thank him one last
time, but they made that im possible. He was wounded in the battle for Nomonhan and
sent home, while I remained in Manchuria until the end of the war, after which I was sent
to Siberia. I was only able to find him several years later, after I was repatriated from my
Siberian internment. We did manage to meet a few times after that, and we corresponded.
But he seemed to avoid talking about what had happened to us at the Khalkha River, and
I myself was not too eager to discuss it. For both of us, it had simply been too enormous
an experience. We shared it by not talking about it. Does this make any sense?
"This has turned into a very long story, but what I wanted to convey to you was my
feeling that real life may have ended for me deep in that well in the desert of Outer
Mongolia. I feel as if, in the intense light that shone for a mere ten or fifteen seconds a
day in the bottom of the well, I burned up the very core of my life, until there was
nothing left. That is how mysterious that light was to me. I can't explain it very well, but
as honestly and simply as I can state it, no matter what I have encountered, no matter
what I have experienced since then, I ceased to feel anything in the bottom of my heart.
Even in the face of those monstrous Soviet tank units, even when I lost this left hand of

mine, even in the hellish Soviet internment camps, a kind of numbness was all I felt. It
may sound strange to say this, but none of that mattered. Something inside me was
already dead. Perhaps, as I felt at the time, I should have died in that light, simply faded
away. That was the time for me to die. But, as Mr. Honda had predicted, I did not die
there. Or perhaps I should say that I could not die there.
"I came back to Japan, having lost my hand and twelve precious years. By the time I
arrived in Hiroshima, my parents and my sister were long since dead. They had put my
little sister to work in a factory, which was where she was when the bomb fell. My father
was on his way to see her at the time, and he, too, lost his life. The shock sent my mother
to her deathbed; she finally passed away in 1947. As I told you earlier, the girl to whom I
had been secretly engaged was now married to another man, and she had given birth to
two children. In the cemetery, I found my own grave. There was nothing left for me. I felt
truly empty, and knew that I should not have come back there. I hardly remember what
my life has been like since then. I became a social studies teacher and taught geography
and history in high school, but I was not, in the true sense of the word, alive. I simply
performed the mundane tasks that were handed to me, one after another. I never had one
real friend, no human ties with the students in my charge. I never loved anyone. I no
longer knew what it meant to love another person. I would close my eyes and see
Yamamoto being skinned alive. I dreamed about it over and over. Again and again I
watched them peel the skin off and turn him into a lump of flesh. I could hear his
heartrending screams. I also had dreams of myself slowly rotting away, alive, in the
bottom of the well. Sometimes it seemed to me that that was what had really happened
and that my life here was the dream.
"When Mr. Honda told me on the bank of the Khalkha River that I would not die on
the continent, I was overjoyed. It was not a matter of believing or not believing: I wanted
to cling to something then- anything at all. Mr. Honda probably knew that and told me
what he did in order to comfort me. But of joy there was to be none for me. After
returning to Japan, I lived like an empty shell. Living like an empty shell is not really
living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell
give birth to nothin g more than the life of an empty shell. This is what I hope I have made
clear to you, Mr. Okada."
"Does this mean," I ventured, "that you never married after returning to Japan?"
"Of course not," answered Lieutenant Mamiya. "I have no wife, no parents or
siblings. I am entirely alone."
After hesitating a moment, I asked, "Are you sorry that you ever heard Mr. Honda's
prediction?"
Now it was Lieutenant Mamiya's turn to hesitate. After a moment of silence, he
looked me straight in the face. "Maybe I am," he said. "Maybe he should never have
spoken those words. Maybe I should never have heard them.'As Mr. Honda said at the
time, a person's destiny is something you look back at afterward, not something to be
known in advance. I do believe this, however: now it makes no difference either way. All
I am doing now is fulfilling my obligation to go on living."
The bus came, and Lieutenant Mamiya favored me with a deep bow. Then he
apologized to me for having taken up my valuable time. "Well, then, I shall be on my
way," he said. "Thank you for everything. I am glad in any case that I was able to hand
you the package from Mr. Honda. This means that my job is done at last. I can go home

with an easy mind." Using both his right hand and the artificial one, he deftly produced
the necessary coins and dropped them into the fare box.
I stood there and watched as the bus disappeared around the next cor-
ner. After it was gone, I felt a strange emptiness inside, a hopeless kind of feeling like
that of a small child who has been left alone in an unfa miliar neighborhood.
Then I went home, and sitting on the living room couch, I opened the package that
Mr. Honda had left me as a keepsake. I worked up a sweat removing layer after layer of
carefully sealed wrapping paper, until a sturdy cardboard box emerged. It was a fancy
Cutty Sark gift box, but it was too light to contain a bottle of whiskey. I opened it, to find
nothing inside. It was absolutely empty. All that Mr. Honda had left me was an empty
box.