9



The Zoo A t t a c k
(or, A Clumsy Massacre)

*


Nutmeg Akasaka told the story of the tigers, the leopards, the wolves, and the bears that
were shot by soldiers on a miserably hot afternoon in August 1945. She narrated with the
order and clarity of a documentary film projected on a stark white screen. She left nothing
vague. Yet she herself had not actually witnessed the spectacle. While it was happening, she
was standing on the deck of a transport ship carrying refugee settlers home to Japan from
Manchuria. What she had actually witnessed was the surfacing of an American submarine.
Like everyone else, she and the other children had come up from the unbearable steam
bath of the ship's hold to lean against the deck rail and enjoy the gentle breezes that moved
across the calm, unbroken sea, when, all at once, the submarine came floating to the surface
as if it were part of a dream. First the antenna and the radar beacon and periscope broke the
surface. Then the conning tower came up, raising a wake as it cut through the water. And
finally, the entire dripping mass of steel exposed its graceful nakedness to the summer sun.
Although in form and shape the thing before her could have been nothing but a submarine, it
looked instead like some kind of symbolic sign-or an incomprehensible metaphor.
The submarine ran parallel to the ship for a while, as if stalking its prey. Soon a hatch
opened, and one crew member, then another and another, climbed onto the deck, moving
slowly, almost sluggishly. From the conning tower deck, the officers examined every detail of
the transport ship through enormous binoculars, the lenses of which would flash every now
and then in the sunlight. The transport ship was full of civilians heading back to Japan, their
destination the port of Sasebo. The majority were women and children, the families of
Japanese officials in the puppet Manchukuo government and of high-ranking personnel of the
Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway, fleeing to the homeland from the chaos that
would follow the impending defeat of Japan in the war. Rather than face the inevitable horror,
they were willing to accept the risk of attack by an American submarine on the open sea-until


now, at least.



The submarine officers were checking to see if the transport ship was unarmed and
without a naval escort. They had nothing to fear. The Americans now had full command of
the air as well. Okinawa had fallen, and few if any fighter planes remained on Japanese soil.
No need to panic: time was on their side. A petty officer barked orders, and three sailors spun
the cranks that turned the deck gun until it was aimed at the transport ship. Two other
crewmen opened the rear-deck hatch and hauled up heavy shells to feed the gun. Yet another
squad of crewmen, with practiced movements, were loading a machine gun they had set on a
raised part of the deck near the conning tower. All the crewmen preparing for the attack wore
combat helmets, although a few of the men were naked from the waist up and nearly half
were wearing short pants. If she stared hard at them, Nutmeg could see brilliant tattoos
inscribed on their arms. If she stared hard, she could see lots of things.
One deck gun and one machine gun constituted the submarine's total firepower, but this
was more than enough to sink the rotting old freighter that had been refitted as a transport
ship. The submarine carried only a limited number of torpedoes, and these had to be reserved
for encounters with armed convoys-assuming there were armed convoys left in Japan. This
was the ironclad rule.
Nutmeg clung to the ship's handrail and watched as the deck gun's black barrel pivoted in
her direction. Dripping wet only moments earlier, it had been baked dry in the summer sun.
She had never seen such an enormous gun before. Back in Hsin-ching, she had often seen
some kind of regimental gun belonging to the Japanese Army, but there was no comparison
between it and the submarine's enormous deck gun. The submarine flashed a signal lamp at
the freighter: Heave to. Attack to commence. Immediately evacuate all passengers to lifeboats.
(Nutmeg could not read the signal lamp, of course, but in retrospect she understood it
perfectly.) Aboard the transport ship, which had undergone minimal conversion from an old
freighter on army orders in the chaos of war, there were not enough lifeboats. In fact, there
were only two small boats for more than five hundred passengers and crew. There were
hardly any life vests or life buoys aboard.
Gripping the rail, holding her breath, Nutmeg stared transfixed at the streamlined
submarine. It shone as if brand-new, without a speck of rust. She saw the white-painted
numerals on the conning tower. She saw the radar antenna rotating above it. She saw the
sandy-haired officer with dark glasses. This submarine has come up from the bottom of the
ocean to kill us all, she thought, but there's nothing strange about that, it could happen
anytime. It has nothing to do with the war; it could happen to anyone anywhere. Everybody
thinks it's happening because of the war. But that's not true. The war is just one of the things
that could happen.
Face-to-face with the submarine and its huge gun, Nutmeg felt no trace of fear. Her
mother was shouting at her, but the words made no sense. Then she felt something grab her
wrists and pull on them. But her hands stayed locked on the rail. The roar of voices all around
her began to move far away, as if someone were turning down the volume on a radio. I'm so
sleepy, she thought. So sleepy. Why am I so sleepy? She closed her eyes, and her
consciousness rushed away, leaving the deck far behind.



Nutmeg was seeing Japanese soldiers as they moved through the extensive zoo shooting
any animal that could attack human beings. The officer gave his order, and the bullets from
the Model 38 rifles ripped through the smooth hide of a tiger, tearing at the animal's guts. The


summer sky was blue, and from the surrounding trees the screams of cicadas rained down like
a sudden shower.
The soldiers never spoke. The blood was gone from their sunburned faces, which made
them look like pictures painted on ancient urns. A few days from now-at most, a week from
now-the main force of the Soviet Far East Command would arrive in Hsin-ching. There was
no way to stop the advance. Ever since the war began, the crack troops and once abundant
equipment of the Kwantung Army had been drained away to support the widening southern
front, and now the greater part of both had sunk to the bottom of the sea or was rotting in the
depths of the jungle. The tanks were gone. The anti-tank guns were gone. All but a handful of
the troop transport trucks had broken down, and there were no spare parts. A general
mobilization could still bring together large numbers of troops, but there were not even
enough old-model rifles left to arm every man, or bullets enough to load every rifle. And so
the great Kwantung Army, "Bulwark of the North," had been reduced to a paper tiger. The
proud Soviet mechanized units that had crushed the German Army were completing their
transfer by rail to the Far Eastern front, with plenty of equipment and with spirits high. The
collapse of Manchukuo was imminent.
Everyone knew this to be the truth, the Kwantung Army Command most of all. And so
they evacuated their main force to the rear, in effect abandoning both the small border
garrisons and the Japanese civilian homesteaders. These unarmed farmers were slaughtered
by the Soviet Army, which was advancing too rapidly to take prisoners. Many women chose-
or were forced to choose-mass suicide over rape. The border garrisons locked themselves into
the concrete bunker dubbed "Fortress for the Ages" and put up a fierce resistance, but without
support from the rear, they were annihilated by the Soviets' overwhelming firepower.
Members of the general staff and other high-ranking officers arranged to have themselves
"transferred" to new headquarters in Tonghua, near the Korean border, and the puppet
emperor Henry Pu-yi and his family threw their possessions together and escaped from the
capital by private train. Most of the Chinese soldiers in the Manchukuo Army assigned to
defend the capital deserted as soon as they heard the Soviets were invading, or else they
staged revolts and shot their Japanese commanding officers. They had no intention of laying
down their lives for Japan in a struggle against superior Soviet troops.
As a result of these interrelated developments, the capital city of Manchukuo, the "Special
New Capital City, Hsin-ching," which the modern Japanese state had staked its reputation on
to construct in the wilderness, was left floating in a strange political vacuum. In order to avoid
needless chaos and bloodshed, the high-ranking Chinese bureaucrats of Manchukuo argued
that Hsin-ching should be declared an open city and surrendered without armed resistance, but
the Kwantung Army rejected this.
The soldiers dispatched to the zoo had resigned themselves to their fate. In a mere few
days, they assumed, they would die fighting the Soviet Army (though in fact, after
disarmament, they would be sent to work-and, in the case of three of the men, to die-in
Siberian coal mines). All they could do was pray that their deaths would not be too painful.
None of them wanted to be crushed under the treads of a slow-moving tank or roasted in a
trench by flamethrowers or die by degrees with a bullet in the stomach. Better to be shot in the
head or the heart. But first they had to kill these zoo animals.



If possible, they were to kill the animals with poison in order to conserve what few bullets
they had left. The young lieutenant in charge of the operation had been so instructed by his
superior officer and told that the zoo had been given enough poison to do the job. The
lieutenant led eight fully armed men to the zoo, a twenty-minute walk from headquarters. The
zoo gates had been closed since the Soviet invasion, and two soldiers were standing guard at


the entrance, with bayonets on their rifles. The lieutenant showed them his orders and led his
men inside.
The zoo's director confirmed that he had indeed been ordered to "liquidate" the fiercer
animals in case of an emergency and to use poison, but the shipment of poison, he said, had
never arrived. When the lieutenant heard this, he became confused. He was an accountant,
assigned to the paymaster's office, and until he was dragged away from his desk at head-
quarters for this emergency detail, he had never once been put in charge of a detachment of
men. He had had to rummage through his drawer to find his pistol, on which he had done no
maintenance for years now, and he was not even sure it would fire.
"Bureaucratic work is always like this, Lieutenant," said the zoo director, a man several
years his senior, who looked at him with a touch of pity. "The things you need are never
there."
To inquire further into the matter, the director called in the zoo's chief veterinarian, who
told the lieutenant that the zoo had only a very small amount of poison, probably not enough
to kill a horse. The veterinarian was a tall, handsome man in his late thirties, with a blue-black
mark on his right cheek, the size and shape of a baby's palm. The lieutenant imagined it had
been there since birth.
From the zoo director's office, the lieutenant telephoned headquarters, seeking further
instructions, but Kwantung Army Headquarters had been in a state of extreme confusion ever
since the Soviet Army crossed the border several days earlier, and most of the high-ranking
officers had disappeared. The few remaining officers had their hands full, burning stacks of
important documents in the courtyard or leading troops to the edge of town to dig antitank
trenches. The major who had given the lieutenant his orders was nowhere to be found. So now
the lieutenant had no idea where they were to obtain the poison they needed. Who in the
Kwantung Army would have been in charge of poisons? His call was transferred from one
office to another, until a medical corps colonel got on the line, only to scream at the
lieutenant, "You stupid son of a bitch! The whole goddamn country's going down the drain,
and you're asking me about a goddamn fucking zoo?! Who gives a shit?"
Who indeed, thought the lieutenant. Certainly not the lieutenant himself. With a dejected
look, he cut the connection and decided to give up on laying in a stock of poison. Now he was
faced with two options. He could forget about killing any animals and lead his men out of
there, or they could use bullets to do the job. Either way would be a violation of the orders he
had been given, but in the end he decided to do the shooting. That way, he might later be
chewed out for having wasted valuable ammunition, but at least the goal of "liquidating" the
more dangerous animals would have been met. If, on the other hand, he chose not to kill the
animals, he might be court-martialed for having failed to carry out orders. There was some
doubt whether there would even be any courts-martial at this late stage of the war, but finally,
orders were orders. So long as the army continued to exist, its orders had to be carried out.
If possible, I'd rather not kill any animals, the lieutenant told himself, in all honesty. But
the zoo was running out of things to feed them, and most of the animals (especially the big
ones) were already suffering from chronic starvation. Things could only get worse-or at least
they were not going to get any better. Shooting might even be easier for the animals
themselves-a quick, clean death. And if starving animals were to escape to the city streets
during intense fighting or air strikes, a disaster would be unavoidable.
The director handed the lieutenant a list of animals for "emergency liquidation" that he
had been instructed to compile, along with a map of the zoo. The veterinarian with the mark
on his cheek and two Chinese workers were assigned to accompany the firing squad. The
lieutenant glanced at the list and was relieved to find it shorter than he had imagined. Among
the animals slated for "liquidation," though, were two Indian elephants. Elephants? the
lieutenant thought with a frown. How in the hell are we supposed to kill elephants?
Given the layout of the zoo, the first animals to be "liquidated" were the tigers. The


elephants would be left for last, in any case. The plaque on the tiger cage explained that the
pair had been captured in Manchuria in the Greater Khingan Mountains. The lieutenant
assigned four men to each tiger and told them to aim for the heart-the whereabouts of which
was just another mystery to him. Oh, well, at least one bullet was bound to hit home. When
eight men together pulled back on the levers of their Model 38s and loaded a cartridge into
each chamber, the ominous dry clicking transformed the whole atmosphere of the place. The
tigers stood up at the sound. Glaring at the soldiers through the iron bars, they let out huge
roars. As an extra precaution, the lieutenant drew his automatic pistol and released the safety.
To calm himself, he cleared his throat. This is nothing, he tried to tell himself. Everybody
does stuff like this all the time.
The soldiers knelt down, took careful aim, and, at the lieutenant's command, pulled their
triggers. The recoil shook their shoulders, and for a moment their minds went empty, as if
flicked away. The roar of the simultaneous shots reverberated through the deserted zoo,
echoing from building to building, wall to wall, slicing through wooded areas, crossing water
surfaces, a stab to the hearts of all who heard it, like distant thunder. The animals held their
breath. Even the cicadas stopped crying. Long after the echo of gunfire faded into the
distance, there was not a sound to be heard. As if they had been whacked with a huge club by
an invisible giant, the tigers shot up into the air for a moment, then landed on the floor of the
cage with a great thud, writhing in agony, vomiting blood. The soldiers had failed to finish the
tigers off with a single volley. Snapping out of their trance, the soldiers pulled back on their
rifle levers, ejecting spent shells, and took aim again.



The lieutenant sent one of his men into the cage to be certain that both tigers were dead.
They certainly looked dead-eyes closed, teeth bared, all movement gone. But it was important
to make sure. The veterinarian unlocked the cage, and the young soldier (he had just turned
twenty) stepped inside fearfully, thrusting his bayonet ahead of him. It was an odd
performance, but no one laughed. He gave a slight kick to one tiger's hindquarters with the
heel of his boot. The tiger remained motionless. He kicked the same spot again, this time a
little harder. The tiger was dead without a doubt. The other tiger (the female) lay equally still.
The young soldier had never visited a zoo in his life, nor had he ever seen a real tiger before.
Which was partly why he couldn't quite believe that they had just succeeded in killing a real,
live tiger. He felt only that he had been dragged into a place that had nothing to do with him
and had there been forced to perform an act that had nothing to do with him. Standing in an
ocean of black blood, he stared down at the tigers' corpses, entranced. They looked much
bigger dead than they had when alive. Why should that be? he asked himself, mystified.
The cage's concrete floor was suffused with the piercing smell of the big cats' urine, and
mixed with it was the warm odor of blood. Blood was still gushing from the holes torn in the
tigers' bodies, forming a sticky black pond around his feet. All of a sudden, the rifle in his
hands felt heavy and cold. He wanted to fling it away, bend down, and vomit the entire
contents of his stomach onto the floor. What a relief it would have been! But vomiting was
out of the question-the squad leader would beat his face out of shape. (Of course, this soldier
had no idea that he would die seventeen months later when a Soviet guard in a mine near
Irkutsk would split his skull open with a shovel.) He wiped the sweat from his forehead with
the back of his wrist. His helmet was weighing down upon him. One cicada, then another,
began to cry again, as if finally revived. Soon their cries were joined by those of a bird-
strangely distinctive cries, like the winding of a spring: Creeeak. Creeeak. The young soldier
had moved from a mountain village in Hokkaido across the sea to China with his parents at
the age of twelve, and together they had tilled the soil of a frontier village in Bei'an until a
year ago, when he had been drafted into the army. Thus he knew all the birds of Manchuria,


but strangely, he had never heard a bird with that particular cry. Perhaps it was a bird
imported from a distant land, crying in its cage in another part of the zoo. Yet the sound
seemed to come from the upper branches of a nearby tree. He turned and squinted in the
direction of the sound, but he could see nothing. A huge elm tree with dense leaves cast its
cool, sharp shadow on the ground below.
He looked toward the lieutenant, as if requesting instructions. The lieutenant nodded,
ordered him out of the cage, and spread open the zoo map again. So much for the tigers. Next
we'll do the leopards. Then maybe the wolves. We've got bears to deal with too. We'll think
about the elephants when the others are finished off, he thought. And then he realized how hot
it was. "Take a breather," he said to his men. "Have some water." They drank from their
canteens. Then they shouldered their rifles, took their places in formation, and headed for the
leopard cage. Up in a tree, the unknown bird with the insistent call went on winding its spring.
The chests and backs of the men's short-sleeved military shirts were stained black with sweat.
As this formation of fully armed soldiers strode along, the clanking of all kinds of metallic
objects sent hollow echoes throughout the deserted zoo. The monkeys clinging to the bars of
their cages rent the air with ominous screams, sending frantic warnings to all the other
animals in the zoo, who in turn joined the chorus in their own distinctive ways. The wolves
sent long howls skyward, the birds contributed a wild flapping of wings, some large animal
somewhere was slamming itself against its cage, as if to send out a threat. A chunk of cloud
shaped like a fist appeared out of nowhere and hid the sun for a time. On that August
afternoon, people, animals-everyone was thinking about death. Today the men would be
killing animals; tomorrow Soviet troops would be killing the men. Probably.



We always sat across from each other at the same table in the same restaurant, talking.
She was a regular there, and of course she always picked up the tab. The back part of the
restaurant was divided into private compartments, so that the conversation at any one table
could not be heard at another. There was only one seating per evening, which meant that we
could talk at our leisure, right up to closing time, without interference from anyone-including
the waiters, who approached the table only to bring or clear a dish. She would always order a
bottle of Burgundy of one particular vintage and always leave half the bottle unconsumed.
"A bird that winds a spring?" I asked, looking up from my food.
"A bird that winds a spring?" said Nutmeg, repeating the words exactly as I had said
them, then curling her lips just a little. "I don't understand what you're saying. What are you
talking about?"
"Didn't you just say something about a bird that winds a spring?"
She shook her head slowly. "Hmm. Now I can't remember. I don't think I said anything
about a bird."
I could see it was hopeless. She always told her stories like this. I didn't ask her about the
mark, either.
"So you were born in Manchuria, then?" I asked.
She shook her head again. "I was born in Yokohama. My parents took me to Manchuria
when I was three. My father was teaching at a school of veterinary medicine, but when the
Hsin-ching city administrators wanted someone sent over from Japan as chief veterinarian for
the new zoo they were going to build, he volunteered for the job. My mother didn't want to
abandon the settled life they had in Japan and go off to the ends of the earth, but my father
insisted. Maybe he wanted to test himself in someplace bigger and more open than Japan. I
was so young, it didn't matter where I was, but I really enjoyed living at the zoo. It was a
wonderful life. My father always smelled like the animals. All the different animal smells
would mix together into one, and it would be a little different each day, like changing the


blend of ingredients in a perfume. I'd climb up onto his lap when he came home and make
him sit still while I smelled him.
"But then the war took a bad turn, and we were in danger, so my father decided to send
my mother and me back to Japan before it was too late. We went with a lot of other people,
taking the train from Hsin-ching to Korea, where a special boat was waiting for us. My father
stayed behind in Hsin-ching. The last I ever saw him, he was standing in the station, waving
to us. I stuck my head out the window and watched him growing smaller and smaller until he
disappeared into the crowd on the platform. No one knows what happened to him after that. I
think he must have been taken prisoner by the Soviets and sent to Siberia to do forced labor
and, like so many others, died over there. He's probably buried in some cold, lonely patch of
earth without anything to mark his grave.
"I still remember everything about the Hsin-ching zoo in perfect detail. I can bring it all
back inside my head-every pathway, every animal. We lived in the chief veterinarian's
official residence, inside the grounds. All the zoo workers knew me, and they let me go
anywhere I wanted- even on holidays, when the zoo was closed."
Nutmeg closed her eyes to bring back the scene inside her mind. I waited, without
speaking, for her to continue her story.
"Still, though, I can't be sure if the zoo as I recall it was really like that. How can I put it?
I sometimes feel that it's too vivid, if you know what I mean. And when I start having
thoughts like this, the more I think about it, the less I can tell how much of the vividness is
real and how much of it my imagination has invented. I feel as if I've wandered into a
labyrinth. Has that ever happened to you?"
It had not. "Do you know if the zoo is still there in Hsin-ching?" I asked.
"I wonder," said Nutmeg, touching the end of her earring. "I heard that the place was
closed up after the war, but I have no idea if it's still closed."
For a very long time, Nutmeg Akasaka was the only person in the world that I could talk
to. We would meet once or twice a week and talk to each other across the table at the
restaurant. After we had met several times like that, I discovered that she was an extremely
accomplished listener. She was quick on the uptake, and she knew how to direct the flow of
the story by means of skillfully inserted questions and responses.
So as to avoid upsetting her in any way, I always took great care whenever we met to see
that my outfit was neat and clean and well chosen. I would put on a shirt fresh from the
cleaner's and choose the tie that best matched it in color. My shoes were always shined and
spotless. The first thing she would do when she saw me was examine me top to bottom, with
the eyes of a chef choosing vegetables. If anything displeased her, she would take me straight
to a boutique and buy me the proper article of clothing. If possible, she would have me change
into it then and there. When it came to clothing, she would accept nothing less than
perfection.
As a result, my closet began to fill up almost before I knew it. Slowly but steadily, new
suits, new jackets, and new shirts were invading the territory that had once been occupied by
Kumiko's skirts and dresses. Before long, the closet was becoming cramped, and so I folded
Kumiko's things, packed them in cartons with mothballs, and put them in a storage area. If
she ever came back, I knew, she would have to wonder what in the world had happened in her
absence.
I took a long time to explain about Kumiko to Nutmeg, little by little- that I had to save
her and bring her back here. She put her elbow on the table, propping her chin in her hand,
and looked at me for a while.
"So where is it that you're going to save Kumiko from? Does the place have a name or
something?"
I searched for the words in space. But they were not there in space. Neither were they
underground. "Someplace far away," I said.


Nutmeg smiled. "It's kind of like The Magic Flute. You know: Mozart. Using a magic
flute and magic bells, they have to save a princess who's being held captive in a faraway
castle. I love that opera. I don't know how many times I've seen it. I know the lines by heart:
'I'm the birdcatcher, Papageno, known throughout the land.' Ever seen it?"
I shook my head. I had never seen it.
"In the opera, the prince and the birdcatcher are led to the castle by three children riding
on a cloud. But what's really happening is a battle between the land of day and the land of
night. The land of night is trying to recapture the princess from the land of day. Midway
through the opera, the heroes can't tell any longer which side is right- who is being held
captive and who is not. Of course, at the end, the prince gets the princess, Papageno gets
Papagena, and the villains fall into hell." Nutmeg ran her finger along the rim of her glass.
"Anyhow, at this point you don't have a birdcatcher or a magic flute or bells."
"But I do have a well," I said.



Whenever I grew tired from talking or I was unable to go on telling my story because I
lost track of the words I needed, Nutmeg would give me a rest by talking about her own early
life, and her stories turned out to be far more lengthy and convoluted than mine. And also,
unlike me, she would impose no order on her stories but would leap from topic to topic as her
feelings dictated. Without explanation, she would reverse chronological order or suddenly
introduce as a major character someone she had never mentioned to me before. In order to
know to which period of her life the fragment belonged that she was presently narrating, it
was necessary to make careful deductions, though no amount of deduction could work in
some cases. She would narrate events she had witnessed with her own eyes, as well as events
that she had never witnessed.



They killed the leopards. They killed the wolves. They killed the bears. Shooting the bears
took the most time. Even after the two gigantic animals had taken dozens of rifle slugs, they
continued to crash against the bars of their cage, roaring at the men and slobbering, fangs
bared. Unlike the cats, who were more willing to accept their fate (or who at least appeared to
accept it), the bears seemed unable to comprehend the fact that they were being killed.
Possibly for that reason, it took them far longer than was necessary to reach a final parting
with that temporary condition known as life. When the soldiers finally succeeded in
extinguishing all signs of life in the bears, they were so exhausted they were ready to collapse
on the spot. The lieutenant reset his pistol's safety catch and used his hat to wipe the sweat
dripping down his brow. In the deep silence that followed the killing, several of the soldiers
seemed to be trying to mask their sense of shame by spitting loudly on the ground. Spent
shells were scattered about their feet like so many cigarette butts. Their ears still rang with the
crackling of their rifles. The young soldier who would be beaten to death by a Soviet soldier
seventeen months later in a coal mine near Irkutsk took several deep breaths in succession,
averting his gaze from the bears' corpses. He was engaged in a fierce struggle to force back
the nausea that had worked its way up to his throat.
In the end, they did not kill the elephants. Once they actually confronted them, it became
obvious that the beasts were simply too large, that the soldiers' rifles looked like silly toys in
their presence. The lieutenant thought it over for a while and decided to leave the elephants
alone. Hearing this, the men breathed a sigh of relief. Strange as it may seem-or perhaps it
does not seem so strange-they all had the same thought: it was so much easier to kill humans
on the battlefield than animals in cages, even if, on the battlefield, one might end up being


killed oneself.
Those animals that were now nothing but corpses were dragged from their cages by the
Chinese workers, loaded onto carts, and hauled to an empty warehouse. There, the animals,
which came in so many shapes and sizes, were laid out on the floor. Once he had seen the
operation through to its end, the lieutenant returned to the zoo director's office and had the
man sign the necessary documents. Then the soldiers lined up and marched away in
formation, with the same metallic clanking they had made when they came. The Chinese
workers used hoses to wash off the black stains of blood on the floors of the cages, and with
brushes they scrubbed away the occasional chunk of animal flesh that clung to the walls.
When this job was finished, the workers asked the veterinarian with the blue-black mark on
his cheek how he intended to dispose of the corpses. The doctor was at a loss for an answer.
Ordinarily, when an animal died at the zoo, he would call a professional to do the job. But
with the capital now bracing for a bloody battle, with people now struggling to be the first to
leave this doomed city, you couldn't just make a phone call and get someone to run over to
dispose of an animal corpse for you. Summer was at its height, though, and the corpses would
begin to decompose quickly. Even now, black swarms of flies were massing. The best thing
would be to bury them-an enormous job even if the zoo had access to heavy equipment, but
with the limited help available to them now, it would obviously be impossible to dig holes
large enough to take all the corpses.
The Chinese workers said to the veterinarian: Doctor, if you will let us take the corpses
whole, we will dispose of them for you. We have plenty of friends to help us, and we know
exactly where to do the job. We will haul them outside the city and get rid of every last speck.
We will not cause you any problems. But in exchange, we want the hides and meat.
Especially the bear meat: everybody will want that. Parts of bear and tiger are good for
medicine-they will command a high price. And though it's too late now to say this, we wish
you had aimed only at their heads. Then the hides would have been worth a good deal more.
The soldiers were such amateurs! If only you had let us take care of it from the beginning, we
wouldn't have done such a clumsy job. The veterinarian agreed to the bargain. He had no
choice. After all, it was their country.
Before long, ten Chinese appeared, pulling several empty carts behind them. They
dragged the animals' corpses out of the warehouse, piled them onto the carts, tied them down,
and covered them with straw mats. They hardly said a word to each other the whole time.
Their faces were expressionless. When they had finished loading the carts, they dragged them
off somewhere. The old carts creaked with the strain of supporting the animals' weight. And
so ended the massacre- what the Chinese workers called a clumsy massacre- of zoo animals
on a hot August afternoon. All that was left were several clean-and empty-cages. Still in an
agitated state, the monkeys kept calling out to one another in their incomprehensible
language. The badgers rushed back and forth in their narrow cage. The birds flapped their
wings in desperation, scattering feathers all around. And the cicadas kept up their grating cry.



After the soldiers had finished their killing and returned to headquarters, and after the last
two Chinese workers had disappeared somewhere, dragging their cart loaded with animal
corpses, the zoo took on the hollow quality of a house emptied of furniture. The veterinarian
sat on the rim of a waterless fountain, looked up at the sky, and watched the group of hard-
edged clouds that were floating there. Then he listened to the cicadas crying. The wind-up
bird was no longer calling, but the veterinarian did not notice that. He had never heard the
wind-up bird to begin with. The only one who had heard it was the poor young soldier who
would be beaten to death in a Siberian coal mine.
The veterinarian took a sweat-dampened pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, put a


cigarette in his mouth, and struck a match. As he lit up, he realized that his hand was
trembling-so much that it took him three matches to light the cigarette. Not that he had
experienced an emotional trauma. A large number of animals had been "liquidated" in a mo-
ment before his eyes, and yet, for some inexplicable reason, he felt no particular shock or
sadness or anger. In fact, he felt almost nothing. He was just terribly puzzled.
He sat there for a while, watching the smoke curl upward from his cigarette and trying to
sort out his feelings. He stared at his hands resting on his lap, then looked once again at the
clouds in the sky. The world he saw before him looked as it always had. He could find in it no
signs of change. And yet it ought to have been a world distinctly different from the one he had
known until then. After all, the world that held him now was a world in which bears and tigers
and leopards and wolves had been "liquidated." Those animals had existed this morning, but
now, at four o'clock in the afternoon, they had ceased to exist. They had been massacred by
soldiers, and even their dead bodies were gone.
There should have been a decisive gap separating those two different worlds. There had to
be a gap. But he could not find it. The world looked the same to him as it always had. What
most puzzled the veterinarian was the unfamiliar lack of feeling inside himself.
Suddenly he realized that he was exhausted. Come to think of it, he had hardly slept at all
the night before. How wonderful it would be, he thought, if I could find the cool shade of a
tree somewhere, to stretch out and sleep, if only for a little while-to stop thinking, to sink into
the silent darkness of unconsciousness. He glanced at his watch. He had to secure food for the
surviving animals. He had to treat the baboon that was running a high fever. There were a
thousand things he had to do. But now, more than anything, he had to sleep. What came
afterward he could think about afterward.
The veterinarian walked into the neighboring wooded area and stretched out on the grass
where no one would notice him. The shaded grass felt cool and good. The smell was
something he remembered fondly from childhood. Several large Manchurian grasshoppers
bounded over his face with a nice strong hum. He lit another cigarette as he lay there, and he
was pleased to see that his hands were no longer trembling so badly. Inhaling the smoke deep
into his lungs, he pictured the Chinese men stripping the hides off all those freshly killed
animals somewhere and cutting up the meat. He had often seen Chinese doing work like that,
and he knew they were anything but clumsy. In a matter of moments, an animal would be
reduced to hide, meat, organs, and bones, as if those elements had originally been quite
separate and had just happened to come together for a little while. By the time I wake from
my nap, I'm sure, those pieces of meat will be out there in the marketplace. That's reality for
you: quick and efficient. He tore off a handful of grass and toyed with its softness awhile.
Then he crushed his cigarette and, with a deep sigh, expelled all the smoke left in his lungs.
When he closed his eyes, the grasshoppers' wings sounded much louder in the darkness. The
veterinarian was overtaken by the illusion that huge grasshoppers the size of bullfrogs were
leaping all around him.
Maybe the world was like a revolving door, it occurred to him as his consciousness was
fading away. And which section you ended up in was just a matter of where your foot
happened to fall. There were tigers in one section, but no tigers in another. Maybe it was as
simple as that. And there was no logical continuity from one section to another. And it was
precisely because of this lack of logical continuity that choices really didn't mean very much.
Wasn't that why he couldn't feel the gap between one world and another? But that was as far
as his thoughts would go. He wasn't able to think more deeply than that. The fatigue in his
body was as heavy and suffocating as a sodden blanket. No more thoughts came to him, and
he just lay there, inhaling the aroma of the grass, listening to the grasshoppers' wings, and
feeling through his skin the dense membrane of shadow that covered him.
And in the end his mind was sucked into the deep sleep of afternoon.





The transport ship cut its engines as ordered, and soon it had come to a standstill on the
surface of the ocean. There was less than one chance in ten thousand that it could have outrun
such a swift, modern submarine. The submarine's deck gun and machine gun were still
trained on the transport ship, its crew in a state of readiness to attack. Yet a strange sense of
tranquillity hovered between the two ships. The submarine's crew stood in full view on deck,
lined up and watching the transport ship with an air of having time to kill. Many of them had
not even bothered to strap on battle helmets. There was hardly any wind that summer after-
noon, and now, with both engines cut, the only sound was the languid slap of waves against
the two ships' hulls. The transport ship signaled to the submarine: "We are a transport ship
carrying unarmed civilians. We have neither munitions nor military personnel on board. We
have few lifeboats." To this the submarine responded brusquely: "That is not our problem.
Evacuation or no, we commence firing in precisely ten minutes." This ended the exchange of
signal messages between the two ships. The captain of the transport ship decided not to
convey the communication to his passengers. What good would it do? A few of them might
be lucky enough to survive, but most would be dragged to the bottom of the sea with this
miserable old washtub. The captain longed for one last drink, but the whiskey bottle- some
fine old scotch he had been saving-was in a desk drawer in his cabin, and there was no time to
get it now. He took off his hat and looked up at the sky, hoping that, through some miracle, a
squadron of Japanese fighter planes might suddenly appear there. But this was not to be a day
for miracles. The captain had done all he could. He thought about his whiskey again.
As the ten-minute grace period was running out, strange movement began on the deck of
the submarine. There were hurried exchanges among the officers lined up on the conning-
tower deck, and one of the officers scrambled down to the main deck and ran among the crew,
shouting some kind of order. Wherever he went, ripples of movement spread among the men
at their battle stations. One sailor shook his head from side to side and punched the barrel of
the deck gun with a clenched fist. Another took his helmet off and stared up at the sky. The
men's actions might have been expressing anger or joy or disappointment or excitement. The
passengers on the transport ship found it impossible to tell what was happening or what this
was leading up to. Like an audience watching a pantomime for which there was no program
(but which contained a very important message), they held their breaths and kept their eyes
locked on the sailors' every movement, hoping to find some small hint of meaning.
Eventually, the waves of confusion that had spread among the sailors began to subside, and in
response to an order from the bridge, the shells were removed from the deck gun with great
dispatch. The men turned cranks and swung the barrel away from the transport ship until the
gun was pointing straight ahead again, then they plugged the horrid black hole of the muzzle.
The gun shells were returned be-lowdecks, and the crew ran for the hatches. In contrast to
their earlier movements, they did everything now with speed and efficiency. There was no
chatting or wasted motion.
The submarine's engines started with a definite growl, and at almost the same moment the
siren screeched to signal "All hands belowdecks!" The submarine began to move forward,
and a moment later it was plunging downward, churning up a great white patch of foam, as if
it had hardly been able to wait for the men to get below and fasten the hatches. A membrane
of seawater swallowed the long, narrow deck from front to rear, the gun sank below the
surface, the conning tower slipped downward, cutting through the dark-blue water, and finally
the antenna and the periscope plunged out of sight, as if to rip the air clean of any evidence
they had ever been there. Ripples disturbed the surface of the ocean for a short while, but soon
they also subsided, leaving only the weirdly calm afternoon sea.
Even after the submarine had plunged beneath the surface, with the same amazing
suddenness that had marked its appearance, the passengers stood frozen on the deck, staring at


the watery expanse. Not a throat was cleared among them. The captain recovered his presence
of mind and gave his order to the navigator, who passed it on to the engine room, and
eventually, after a long fit of grinding, the antique engine started up like a sleeping dog kicked
by its master.
The crew of the transport ship held their breaths, waiting for a torpedo attack. The
Americans might have simply changed their plans, deciding that sinking the ship with a
torpedo would be faster and easier than a time-consuming volley from the gun. The ship ran
in short zigzags, the captain and navigator scanning the ocean's surface with their binoculars,
searching for the deadly white wake of a torpedo. But there was no torpedo. Twenty minutes
after the submarine had disappeared beneath the waves, people at last began to break free of
the death curse that had hung over them. They could only half believe it at first, but little by
little they came to feel that it was true: they had come back alive from the verge of death. Not
even the captain knew why the Americans had suddenly abandoned their attack. What could
have changed their minds? (Only later did it become clear that instructions had arrived from
headquarters just moments before the attack was to have begun, advising them to suspend all
hostilities unless attacked by the enemy. The Japanese government had telegraphed the Allied
powers that they were prepared to accept the Potsdam Declaration and surrender
unconditionally.) Released now from the unbearable tension, several passengers plopped
down on the deck where they stood and began to wail, but most of them could neither cry nor
laugh. For several hours-and, in the case of some, for several days-they remained in a state of
total abstraction, the spike of a long and twisted nightmare thrust unmercifully into their
lungs, their hearts, their spines, their brains, their wombs.
Little Nutmeg Akasaka remained sound asleep in her mother's arms all the while this was
happening. She slept for a solid twenty hours, as if she had been knocked unconscious. Her
mother shouted and slapped her cheeks to no avail. She might as well have sunk to the bottom
of the sea. The intervals between her breaths grew longer and longer, and her pulse slowed.
Her breathing was all but inaudible. But when the ship arrived in Sasebo, she woke without
warning, as if some great power had dragged her back into this world. And so Nutmeg did not
herself witness the events surrounding the aborted attack and disappearance of the American
submarine. She heard everything much later, from her mother.
The freighter finally limped into the port of Sasebo a little past ten in the morning on
August 16, the day after the nonattack. The port was weirdly silent, and no one came out to
greet the ship. Not even at the antiaircraft emplacement by the harbor mouth were there signs
of humanity. The summer sunlight baked the ground with dumb intensity. The whole world
seemed caught in a deep paralysis, and some on board felt as if they had stumbled by accident
into the land of the dead. After years spent abroad, they could only stare in silence at the
country of their ancestors. At noon on August 15, the radio had broadcast the Emperor's
announcement of the war's end. Six days before that, the nearby city of Nagasaki had been
incinerated by a single atomic bomb. The phantom empire of Manchukuo was disappearing
into history. And caught unawares in the wrong section of the revolving door, the veterinarian
with the mark on his cheek would share the fate of Manchukuo.