Little Aunt Crane Read online

  The head of Shironami village took off his overcoat, and laid it over what remained of the old marksman. By the look of things, there was nothing more the heads of the five villages could do. Just light a torch. Let there be nothing left for the Soviets and Chinese to violate.

  The Shironami village head spoke. He said: ‘This is the way it should be: the man in every village who is entrusted with the gun must carry out his responsibilities to the end, and make certain that the fire has been lit before he turns the gun on himself.’ The village heads agreed, saying: ‘This is the only possible way; we are left with no choice but to depend on his selflessness. It’s certainly a pity that this old sharpshooter left his body to fall at the last into the dirty hands of the Chinese or Soviets.’

  None of them noticed the girl called Tatsuru walking away quietly. As soon as she was out of sight, she broke into a run, her dishevelled hair streaming out behind her. She was not used to running; even as she fled she was horribly conscious of the immodesty of taking such big strides, showing her legs. Tatsuru would have to run five kilometres, and risk crossing the railway bridge with Soviets coming and going across it, to run back to the village and tell her mother what the head proposed for them all. She was not much of a runner, but she was going to have to race against the village head on her own two feet, so she could get there before him, to tell of that great red ball formed from a whole family’s blood, and the empty skull of the old sharpshooter pointing skywards, over seventy years of memories, wisdom and secret thoughts spattered pinkish white on the trunk of the tree. She had to get there first, to tell her neighbours in the village about these things, to give them another choice besides a ‘good death’.

  Just as the railway bridge came into view, shots rang out again from Sakito village. Tatsuru’s footsteps faltered for a moment, then she ran faster. The bridge was at the bottom of the slope, and she could already see several wagons standing on the track. A Soviet soldier was squatting in the doorway of one; he seemed to be brushing his teeth. Tatsuru had scratched her face on a tree branch, and it stung painfully from her sweat. She could not take the bridge over the river, she would need to go downriver and find a shallow place to cross. But the slopes downstream were covered in dense, wild thickets of hazel, and she had neither the time nor the strength to force her way through – and she wasn’t a strong swimmer, what if she could not get across?

  Tatsuru did not realise that she was sobbing. The world was so utterly hopeless.

  She turned on her heel and dashed off in another direction. There was a village called Tunzi not far from here, where three Chinese men lived who often worked as hired hands for her family. One of them, a man of thirty or so, her mother called ‘Fudan’. The men got on fairly well with her mother, sometimes they even went so far as to exchange smiles. Tatsuru could go to Fudan, and he would see her back home; the Soviet soldiers would take her for a Chinese. The Soviets would be far less likely to take liberties with a Chinese woman. Tatsuru had been to Tunzi once with Fudan, to visit a herbalist. But she could not speak a word of Chinese, so how would she convince Fudan to see her safely over a bridge guarded by the Soviets?

  Tatsuru regretted her decision before she was properly inside Tunzi village. A large group of Chinese children were playing in the entrance to Tunzi, and when they saw her they gradually left off what they were doing and crowded towards her, staring, faces hard as iron. They had scowled in the past too, but never looked at her directly. One child said something in a low voice. She understood nothing else, but the three sounds that meant ‘Little Jap’ she knew well enough. Before she had made up her mind whether or not to run, a seven-or eight-year-old boy had already heaved a rock at her. After that stones, clods of earth and lumps of dung rained down, and it was too late to run even though she wanted to, and all her ways of escape were blocked. The only thing she could do was curl in a ball on the ground, wailing. Small boys are just like grown men: they have no idea how to deal with a weeping woman, and once Tatsuru started to cry, she became as pathetic and disgusting as Chinese girls to them. They stood around her, and looked on for a while. A hand came up and gently tugged at a lock of Japanese hair – look, nothing special – and let it go. Another hand yanked down the back of her collar to see her Japanese back: no different from a Chinese. Fairly soon the boys got sick of her crying, and ran off with a yell.

  When Fudan saw Tatsuru, there was no need for her to say a word, he knew what he had to do. He must see her back home at once, there was no way he could let the neighbours see a Jap girl at his house. Fudan put one of his own ragged gowns around her shoulders, and rubbed a fistful of dirt into her face, a technique the girls in the village had used to keep Japanese soldiers at arm’s length. Fudan was too poor to keep a horse or donkey, so he pushed her over the railway bridge in a handcart.

  When Fudan brought Tatsuru to the village she was fast asleep. Her mother asked Fudan to put Tatsuru down inside the door, bowed to him and thanked him quietly over and over again. Her mother could speak perhaps thirty or forty words of Chinese; now she was using them for all she was worth. After Fudan left, her mother gently removed the gold rings from Tatsuru’s ears, but even that did not wake her.

  The minute Tatsuru woke she leapt up from the ground: Too late! The village heads must be back by now! The noonday sun was shining down, bleaching the country all around to a brilliant white; when Tatsuru’s bare feet touched the earth she felt like she was gliding backwards. Her mother returned with buckets of water, running at a crouch to avoid making herself a target for ambushers. Tatsuru stamped her feet and reproached her mother angrily for not waking her: now it was too late.

  The news Tatsuru had brought soon became common knowledge all over the village. The people of Shironami sent boys to carry the news to the other Japanese Pioneer settlements. There were no menfolk in Shironami, barely even any old men, so the village head had always been one man in charge of an enormous family of women. By the time he came back, it would be too late for him to lead them as the headman of Sakito village had. It was all too sudden; they would need at least an hour to pack their luggage. They could do without most things, but they had to take all their food, at least, and the rifles that had been issued to every settlement, five per village. No matter what, they had to flee before the village head. They conceded that the people of Sakito village were a fine example, but they did not want the Shironami village head to lead them to be such exemplary Japanese.

  At sunset, the people of the five remaining settlements of the ‘Great Manchuria Development Group’ gathered in the playground of the Shironami village primary school. Everyone was asking questions and answering them at the same time. With such a crowd, nobody could take the lead. They had heard that there was a city with a receiving centre for Japanese, from where you could take the boat back to Japan. This group, mainly women and children, set off with only a schoolboy’s compass to guide them. Soviet and Chinese raiders had carried off almost all their livestock, leaving only those that were too old or too young. These feeble beasts became mounts for the elderly.

  They set off on the 250-kilometre march, the women taking tiny steps in their wooden shoes. A woman called Amon was eight months pregnant; she rushed from the front of the procession to the back, and then hurried to the front again, pestering everyone for news of her husband Kirinoshita Taro and her son. They were too tired to reply, or do more than just shake their heads. Tatsuru staggered behind her mother, carrying a bag of rice balls on her back. Her mother was carrying Tatsuru’s four-year-old sister on her back, and pulling her eight-year-old brother by the hand. As she stumbled along, Tatsuru was privately exulting over her success that day: after all, she had beaten the village heads in a race. It never occurred to her that the village elders had needed half a day to deal with Sakito village, and she had already forgotten the gunshots she had heard that morning by the railway line, which had been fired by a group of Chinese guerrillas. This was a civilian armed force whose exact nature was hard to def
ine, who did both good things and bad: resisting the Japanese, suppressing bandits, opposing Communists – everything depended on who happened to be in their way, not to mention who had the upper hand. They had been planning to enter Sakito village to see what they could find: if they found injustice they would avenge it, if they found enemies they would pay them back, if they found some way to take advantage they would take it. Instead they ran into five Japanese village heads returning to their villages, so they opened fire, and gave them what they were looking for, ahead of schedule.

  Three hours after they had set off, the people were starting to miss their village heads. By this time dusk was falling around them, and the near 3,000-strong cavalcade had left the main road and was walking on an earthen track the width of a single cart. The procession had become long and scattered; mothers were constantly begging the cavalcade to stop, so that they could comfort their children, who could not walk any further. Women would say to their children, who were hanging back by the side of the road: Get up, quick, the headman’s coming! If the village headman had been there, they thought, he might have been able to keep the children on their worn, bleeding feet. Just at that moment, gunshots rang out from the sorghum fields on either side of the road. The first casualties were two old people riding on animals, then several women took a bullet as they were running along the road. The children threw back their heads and howled. One old man who managed to keep calm shouted: Down on your stomachs, don’t move! They threw themselves down on their bellies, but the old man had already been hit. The battle was over before they had a chance to fire the guns they had brought.

  By the time the troop re-formed, they discovered they had lost more than thirty of their companions. Nobody had brought any digging tools; the relatives of the dead cut a lock of hair, laid the bodies in a ditch by the side of the road, covered them with a decent piece of clothing and continued on their way.

  Every day there were ambushes. They all became accustomed to death; they no longer had the energy to cry over the dead, just silently unloaded the food they had been carrying. People also became accustomed to respecting the wishes of the gravely injured, putting them to death in the quickest, cleanest way. Others were not willing to die. Amon was one of these. When Tatsuru saw her, she was lying in a bed of her own blood, head pillowed on a lump of earth. Her newborn child was lying beside her, its short life over after just a few minutes. She waved her bloody hands to everyone who passed, calling out ‘Keep going!’ No doubt she believed she was smiling, but her face was twisted into a grimace of pain. She said to everyone who came near: ‘Don’t kill me, I’ll catch you up in a bit! I haven’t found my son and husband yet!’ A man in his fifties took pity on her, and left her a sack of rice balls.

  The old people saved rice for the young. They also saved them bullets and trouble. As a group they came to an agreement, and threw themselves into the next river they crossed, where they vanished without a sound.

  The villagers fumbled their way towards experience: by trial and error they discovered that their chances of getting hit were lower after dark, so they started to move on at night and make camp by day. On the evening of the fifth day, when they woke up, they found that several of the families who had been sleeping at the edge of the camp had been hacked to death with knives. One of the survivors said apologetically: ‘We really were just too tired, we didn’t hear a thing.’ Someone else added: ‘Even if we had heard, what then?’

  Their route had dragged itself out to twice its original length, and they had run out of provisions. Tatsuru’s mother taught the women to recognise edible leaves and wild fruit. She told them that it was rare for a Chinese to starve to death, because they knew how to make every kind of wild grass and leaves into food. This was a skill she had learned from the Chinese hired hands. Luckily it was autumn; they found a thicket of nut trees, where they gathered enough to last them two days. All the mothers of teenage daughters cut off their hair and found them dark-coloured boys’ clothes to wear. Although the road became harder with every passing day, and their numbers were decreasing daily, they had already put nearly two hundred kilometres behind them.

  Early one morning they came to a copse of silver birches. They were preparing to set up camp when shots rang out from deep within the birch wood. By now, they had learned to dodge swiftly behind the trees and lie flat, children safely hidden beneath their mothers’ bodies. The enemy were very free with their ammunition, firing off their bullets a clip at a time. The war was over, there was no need to conserve bullets, they were shooting for the sheer joy of it, regardless of whether or not they actually hit anything. When the shooting reached its climax, they heard their attackers cheering in Russian. A few of the youths who had just learned to shoot started to return fire. They had had some gratifying successes with guns: once when they had run into an ambush they had shot back a few times, and the attackers had left them in peace. But on this occasion retaliating was precisely the wrong thing to do, like poking a hornets’ nest. The Soviet soldiers had not taken them seriously at first, but now their fighting instincts were aroused.

  The Japanese settlers fell back, abandoning the dead and dragging the wounded with them. The terrain was far from favourable, with a gentle downward slope behind them. They had retreated a hundred metres when Russian battle cries suddenly broke out from another direction. They were caught in a pincer movement. Now they were as likely to get a bullet if they moved as if they stayed where they were. The youngsters fired back erratically, no more than a few shots, but enough to reveal their positions to the opposition, and they were soon picked off, one by one.

  The gunfire increased in ferocity. Having inflamed the Soviets’ temper, they had no choice but to let them work it off for a while.

  Did they not hear the sound of the children crying? Could they possibly not know that their opponents were a crowd of women and children? A grenade exploded next to Tatsuru’s mother, and when the smoke had cleared, Tatsuru no longer had a mother, brother or sister. Her father had died in battle in the Philippines the year before. Perhaps it was a blessing that her present danger did not leave Tatsuru at leisure to ponder her newly orphaned condition. She was following the others as they tried to break out of the encirclement, keening in grief for her whole family as she ran.

  By the time they had escaped from the ambush, only half of the villagers remained. Their losses on this occasion accounted for two-thirds of all they had sustained in their entire journey. Another hundred were wounded; they used up all their blood-clotting powder in one go that day.

  They woke at dusk on the second day to find that all the wounded had committed suicide. They had plotted together in the night and, resolved not to hold everyone back, they had helped each other to stagger to a stretch of ground fifty metres away. They had employed all kinds of different means, but they had all become exemplary Japanese in that one night.

  Another day passed, and the group advanced at a crawl over the mountain roads. They modified their route again and again, choosing the remotest roads, but this took them deeper into the mountains. The children had drunk no water for two days, and could no longer be coaxed to move. The babies on the mothers’ backs were howling – no longer crying now, but the yowls of a wild cat on the point of death.

  There was not a grain of rice left. Mothers who had had no water or rice for two days stuffed their dry, shrivelled breasts in the children’s mouths: children at the breast and the older children too, including those children who had lost their mothers, anyone with breasts would do what they could for them. The procession had long since become shapeless and disorganised, straggling along the paths for more than a kilometre or two. They kept finding that children had wandered away, and adults had dropped dead in their tracks. The only thing that could induce the children to take a step was saying, ‘We’re nearly there, and once we’re there we can sleep.’ Their expectations were not so high now, anything was fine so long as they could rest their feet. They had stopped believing ‘There’ll
be water to drink and food to eat when we get there’ a long time ago.

  It was September 1945 as this procession of dried-up ghosts was walking through Manchuria. All over the mountains and wilderness the autumn leaves flamed and burned a brilliant red. Autumn is very short in Manchuria; when they camped out in the open, there would be frost all round them in the mornings. They relied on wild fruits and leaves, belief and determination to reach their goal to keep body and soul together. After fifteen days’ journey on foot, their numbers had already fallen to just over a thousand.

  One morning they ran into the Chinese militia. Their march had taken them closer than they intended to a market town, disturbing the three hundred soldiers quartered there, all armed with Japanese-made guns and bombs. First they blocked their way and fired on the villagers, then they chased after them, still shooting. The villagers fled to a pine wood on the top of a mountain, as the sound of gunfire gradually faded behind them. The women had broken free of the attack carrying children on their backs or in their arms. Tatsuru had a three-year-old girl on her back; the child had a high fever, and her every exhalation was like a tiny ball of fire on the nape of Tatsuru’s neck. The girl’s mother, whose name was Chieko, was carrying her son of less than a year in her arms. Oblivious to the bullets, she sat down hard on the ground, white foam hanging from the corners of her mouth. Another woman went back to drag her along, but she resisted desperately, gripping onto a tree with both her feet. The child in her arms wailed piercingly; the woman’s two wide, spiritless eyes seemed like empty caves. At that moment, she stooped over the crying child in her arms with a peculiar motion, and people near to her saw her knife-sharp shoulder blades rise up strangely. When she straightened up, the baby had fallen silent. The women around her did not make a sound, backing away as if in fear of her, as they watched her lower her dead child to the ground and haul herself upright, clinging to the tree for support.