34  South   Korea – J M Lee – The Investigation – April 2016 (Score 8.33)

This story is told by a young man who was a prison guard in Fukuoka Prison in Japan, on the west coast near Nagasaki, during the Second World War. At the time he is telling the story he is imprisoned in the same establishment as being a low-level war criminal. His name is Watanabe Yuichi.

At the beginning of the period he is recording he was tasked by his commander to investigate the murder of another of the guards, Sugiyama Dozan, and who, and why, did it. In the guard’s pocket Yuichi found a small sheet of paper with a poem. He described the words of the poem as being “nestled together to create small villages”. This is a strange metaphor.

Yuichi was a student of liberal arts before being drafted during the war. He was clearly well educated and of a literary bent. He was a literate man who loved books and poetry. He met Iwanami Midori, a young nurse at the prison, playing a piano and practicing for an upcoming concert.

In a supreme act of irony, Maeda, Yuichi’s superior officer gave Yuichi the job of censor, formerly carried out by Sugiyama. This involved Sugiyama, and hence Yuichi, in book burning of such subversive and dangerous authors as Turgenev, Hawthorne, Dante, Shakespeare and Stendhal. In his words he had become an executioner of literature.

Yuichi found the killer (read the book to learn how) and persuaded him to confess without any use of violence, unlike Sugiyama. He was promoted to corporal and told to take no further action on the case. He was flummoxed.

We learned that the brutal guard Sugiyama had another side. He could tune a piano to perfection, loved and wrote poetry. Even in a book where brutal events took place there are occasional beautiful images (see page 137) “Caught in the barbed wire the afternoon sunshine flashed like the scales of a fish in a net”.

At page 141 the inmates saw kites flying outside the walls of the prison. These kites played an increasing role in the story especially when a prisoner made one and started to fly it, and a kite war started.

We learned that Sugiyama had worked with another prisoner, Dong-ju, to enable him to convert surplus government documents into paper to allow books to be translated into Korean and written up on the treated paper. It does seem unrealistic in the time-scale discussed in the book that this could be done to the extent claimed. Named books are “Les Miserable”, “The Poetry of Francis Jammes”, “The Works of Kierkegaard”, “Don Quixote”, “The Greek Myths”, “Robinson Crusoe”, “Romeo and Juliet”, works of Andre Gide”, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Dickens, Hugo and Goethe (The Sorrows of Young Werther).

Most of these books are many hundreds of pages long in their original language. It seems likely that it is only the gist of the stories which are transcribed into Korean because of the sheer length of most of these books.

Dong-ju was educated, so he would certainly have been able to do the translations and transcriptions, but ---. Yuichi discovered about fifty volumes which had been transcribed like this, say 2500 pages.

The method employed by the prisoners was for those who could read Dong-ju’s translations to memorise as much of a book as they could while in solitary confinement. They then told the story to those who couldn’t read, who memorised it as told to them and passed it on again. This reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”.

Despite the above difficulty with a crucial part of the plot I did enjoy the book, and I recommend it to you. I scored it at 8.0.