Finger Bone E-Book

Hiroki Takahashi

• Herausgeber: Honford Star
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 137

Beschreibung

1942. At the turning point of the war, the Imperial Japanese Army is in retreat. On Papua New Guinea, the unnamed narrator of Finger Bone is wounded in the fighting and sent to a field hospital to recover. There, he befriends other injured men only to watch them die one by one from their wounds, hunger, and disease. When a soldier dies, instead of a returning the body to Japan, a medic cuts off the corpse's index finger, burns away the flesh, and prepares the remaining bone to be sent back to the soldier's family. The narrator carries the finger bone of his friend in an aluminum tin with the promise he will return the bone to his comrade's young son. Finger Bone is the prize-winning debut by famed Japanese author Hiroki Takahashi. The novel explores the self-consuming nature of imperialism, the ingloriousness of war, and how we are all identical in death.

Leseprobe

Finger Bone

HIROKI TAKAHASHI

Translated by Takami Nieda

Contents

Finger Bone

Afterword

Finger Bone

THE YELLOW ROAD stretched far and beyond.

Where the road would lead, I could not say. Perhaps it would not deliver us to Salamaua. We had no choice but to press on.

I’d stopped walking some time ago. With my body propped against the base of a tree resembling a Japanese elm, I gazed at the husks of men shambling past. Hunched forward as if weighed down by a heavy burden, they dragged one foot, then the other, slowly across the yellow dirt, towing long shadows behind them. One shadow receded toward a pair of ankles, its owner listing forward. A thud. The human stirred no more. As the sun traced an arc across the sky, his shadow ticked around him like a sundial.

On my stomach rested a steel mass, which I gripped with both hands, as though it were my spirit. I thought of the finger bone tucked away in my rucksack. The one I’d stored in the bento box. I’d made a pinky promise with the bone.

Perhaps I should have died that night in the foxhole. Should have taken shrapnel in the belly and died. Perhaps it was because I’d failed to accomplish this, I realize now, that my fate became tied to the yellow road.

Pinned inside the foxhole, I had felt a searing heaviness in my left shoulder. I touched it, and something warm dribbled down my hand. The palm was caked with red mud. I took out a triangular bandage from my pack and wrapped the wound, starting at the armpit and over the shoulder several times. I bit down on one end of the bandage, held the other end with the right hand, and pulled with all my might. A whimper escaped my lips. A greasy sweat beaded my face. The searing heaviness gave way to the horrible cracking of bone. Waves of pain crested and ebbed in time with my heartbeat.

A grenade exploded nearby, raining red dirt, branches, and palm fronds around me. My schoolmate Furuya had died only moments ago. He lay on his side in the grass, half his head torn off. His blood streaked for several meters across the grass as if it’d been dashed by someone’s hand. Am I going to die like Furuya? I hunkered down in the hole, cradling my rifle.

The noise of guns and artillery ceased before sundown. The mountainside of Isurava turned quiet, and I sensed the presence of death, sensed it creeping toward the foxhole where I lay crouched. Holding the helmet on my head with one hand, I ventured a look out from the lip.

Two shots rang in my ears. It wasn’t me that was hit. I sighted Sergeant Tanabe slumped over the edge of his foxhole, clutching his bayoneted rifle. A red stain unfurled like a flower on the back of his uniform. Standing in the grass was an Australian soldier, his rifle aimed at the sergeant. He hadn’t seen me yet. I gripped the bolt handle of my rifle and pulled it back. I maneuvered to bring the muzzle out of the hole. The barrel snagged in the dirt and a pathetic sound of metal rang out. My left arm shuddered in pain. The young, pale-faced soldier stood blankly, his blue eyes staring at my head poking out of the hole. I squeezed the trigger. The bullet bore into the base of his neck. He squawked something in English, and with a hand pressed against his neck spouting blood, he fell over backward. Dead. Black blood spread across the grass in the setting sun. After ascertaining his end, I dropped back into my hole.

Dusk seeped across the jungle depths on the island which was located south of the equator. The foxhole, barely large enough for one man, was being overtaken by darkness, until I could no longer make out my hand. The moon rose above the palm trees soon after. I glimpsed the stained bandage on my shoulder in the pale moonlight. The blood on my hands had hardened and turned the color of iron sand. The air smelled of blood and steel. Gangly roots peeked out from the earth about me. The hole was littered with spent cartridges, cigarette butts, withered palm fronds, clumps of red dirt.

I tried crawling out of the hole once or twice but couldn’t summon the strength. I’d lost too much blood. I wasn’t able to lift myself up with the good arm alone. I prayed for some friendlies to find me, but the Australians were just as likely to find me first. In the event of my discovery by the enemy, I was to take my life there in the foxhole. Gripped in my blood-caked hands was the grenade, which had been saved for exactly that purpose. A Type 99 hand grenade detonates four seconds after pulling the firing pin and striking the head of the fuse. When the time came, I would draw the steel cylinder toward me and ball myself up like a pill bug. Don’t think about anything for four seconds. Imagine your warm belly being blown open and you’re likely to throw your only grenade out of the hole. The foxhole was one I dug the night before. If you die here, that would mean you dug your own grave, I thought, and had to laugh. With the grenade snuggled against my belly, I drifted into a shallow sleep.

The next morning, I was awakened by a flood of sunshine. The dark-blue sky expanded above me. At times, a shadowy figure peered in, hindering my view, then moved off, and the sky opened up again. Voices from somewhere in the distance. Where did the grenade go? I couldn’t move my body. I faded again.

Days later, I was sitting on a bed at a field hospital, rubbing the knob that had formed on the left side of my back. I felt something hard beneath the flesh and the bandage. A hardness not of bone, but of lead. It was to have the lead removed that I waited to see the doctor. That night in the foxhole, I had escaped being killed and from having to kill myself. A squad of friendlies had found me and pulled me out of the hole.

I wasn’t taken to the field hospital directly but to a facility in a palm grove near Isurava. Whether it could properly be called a hospital was debatable as it was nothing more than a Type 95 canopy tent tied to some palm trees, some stretchers placed on the ground. Men with critical cases of malaria slept on the stretchers, in still silence, their faces the color of earthenware. Some of them might have been dead already. The Army doctor applied iodine on my wounds. “A couple of bullet wounds,” he drawled. “Looks like they went clean through. You’ll heal soon enough.” Then he bandaged up the shoulder and gave me a shot to prevent tetanus and gangrene. The listless man with pouched eyes didn’t look much like a doctor, perhaps due to his impotence. With supply lines stalled, quinine had become hard to come by. The patients on the stretchers were not being treated but were merely waiting for death to take them.

Unlike the tent hospital in the palm grove, the field hospital to where I was eventually transferred had a proper roof, a floor, and walls. Three rows of wooden beds, which appeared to have been built hastily on-site, were arranged down the length of the infirmary. Grass shades hung in the windows and outside was a modest veranda. That a hospital of this size could be built so far inland was impressive. There must have been a number of carpenters in the detachment assigned to build it. Sometime after coming to the hospital, I began to feel an odd sensation in the back of my shoulder. Whenever I turned over in bed, something cold and foreign rolled beneath the skin. Soon a small knob formed, and it grew larger by the day. The flesh was trying to push the lead out of my body. The doctor back at the palm grove had left a bullet inside me.

The doctor here stuck his head out of the examination room and called my name. I quit rubbing the knob and got up from the bed. A soldier on crutches missing a leg hobbled out of the examination room as I went in.

I sat down on the stool, and after I explained my condition, the doctor came around to my back. Before me was a table and beyond that a medicine cabinet. The shelves were lined with bottles of iodine tincture, Wilson’s ointment, and bismuth subnitrate. Empty bottles of quinine were strewn in a pile in a corner of the room. The sunlight trickling in between the palm fronds cast an amber shadow behind the bottles. On the table was an aluminum tray containing several surgical instruments. The scalpel and forceps glinted coldly in the room which was otherwise lit softly by the sun. There was a time I met a soldier who got shot up in the thigh by a Curtis P-40 fighter. The bullet holes were tiny, as American machine guns are of a smaller caliber. The thigh was riddled with pits where the bullets had exited. Each wound had to be pried open with forceps to remove the bullets that had gotten lodged. It must have smarted pretty good when the bullets went into him and smarted pretty good when the forceps entered the slits and dug them out. The doctor took a look at the knob on my back and grunted. He stroked the hairs on his chin. He picked up a scalpel from the aluminum tray and drew the blade over the blue flame of the alcohol lamp. He grabbed hold of my shoulder from behind. I straightened my back.

“Hunch your back a bit, will you? To stretch the skin.”

I bent forward slightly, steadying my eyes on the tips of my lace-up boots. The doctor pinched the knob between two fingers, pulled the skin taut, and made an incision at the base. Sweat sheened my forehead. I gritted my molars to fight back the pain. The scalpel cut deeper. It couldn’t have been more than a centimeter or two, yet the pain felt as if the entire length of the blade had slipped inside. The tip of the blade touched something fibrous, arresting my breathing. Something soft, warm, and rubbery. When the blade sliced into it, I felt the sure pain of cold steel. Suppressing the groan in the back of my throat, I expelled a deep breath and felt the warm blood running down my back. There was a metallic rattle behind me, and the doctor pressed a gauze pad against the wound. On the aluminum tray was a bloody slug about the size of a fingertip flecked with flesh.

After bandaging up the wound, the doctor stuck his head out of the examination room and called the name of the next patient. As I went out, a dark-complexioned soldier emaciated with malaria walked in, probably to get an injection of Ringer’s solution.

The wound throbbed so sharply that I couldn’t lie down. I sat on the edge of the bed and waited for the pain to settle. A young medic came around and starting at one end, called out to each of the patients in turn. The live ones let out a moan or a groan. The patient to my right let out neither. After checking the patient’s pulse and pupils, the medic slid a plywood board beneath the deceased’s hand. He took out a knife and brought the blade down on the soldier’s finger as if he were cutting a carrot and moved on.

“That’s a lucky man to have his finger taken for his family like that,” the patient on my left muttered, propping himself up in the bed. “Die in the jungle all alone, and all the family gets back home is three stones.”

The man’s face was almost entirely covered in bandages.

The enormous island floats in the ocean, just south of the equator. The peninsula extends southeast from the island, like a bird’s tail. Though it appears narrow on a map, the peninsula measures three hundred kilometers wide. Our objective, we were told, was to make landfall on the peninsula’s eastern coast, cut through the jungle, and take the American base at Port Moresby on the western coast. “MacArthur himself is on that western base. The man who kills him will be immortalized in history,” blustered an officer, but who knew if any of it was true. About midway into our advance, I was wounded near the village of Isurava and transported behind the lines. One time, Sergeant Tanabe had shown me a rough map, where beyond Isurava were names like Kagi, Nauro, and Ioribaiwa, written in pencil. None of us was in possession of an accurate map. No such map existed, as no one had ever attempted to cross the island on foot. We were to map the terrain as we went. Beyond Ioribaiwa, we were told, lay the western coast where the American base was situated.

The Japanese Army continued its advance down the length of the peninsula according to plan. According to plan, at least, until I was wounded at Isurava. Despite being slowed by a number of skirmishes, within days, the Army expanded its territory to the center of the peninsula. Food was scarce, but once we captured the western base, we would be able to secure a food supply. Strike swiftly and procure supplies locally—that had been the Army’s strategy before, and so it was on the island. There was, however, something unsettling about the way the enemy engaged us. Every time the Japanese Army took the fight to the American and Australian forces, they retreated without putting up much of a fight. When the Japanese forces chased them down to make another attack, they retreated again.

“A disappointment, really,” one officer scoffed. “The white man is not a soldier but a tourist.”

Indeed, that was one way of looking at it.

The field hospital stood nestled against the mountains. No doubt the Army had chosen the site fearing discovery by the enemy. Past the veranda was a makeshift courtyard dotted with tree stumps, and beyond that loomed the jungle. Backed by the mountains and fronted by the jungle, the courtyard was completely enclosed save the hill in the western corner. The gentle slope was carpeted with undergrowth and flowers swaying in the breeze. Every day, the sun peeked out from over the mountains and dipped behind the hill. It was how I determined due west.

The words “XX Division Field Hospital No. 3” had been carved with a knife on a tree at the entrance.

In the afternoons, a group of wounded soldiers exercised in the courtyard. They moved about slowly, stretching, bending, reaching. Lying in a hospital bed for days on end weakened the legs. When we went back to the front, we would have to resume the march. If you fell behind and got ambushed, you were going to get killed. I stretched like the others and took a stroll around the courtyard afterward. The landscape was verdant with vegetation. Plants with thick, droopy leaves. Oversized flower petals of red and yellow, mottled with black. Patches of bright colors like those found on a paint palette. In one corner stood a tree thrusting its branches toward the sky. Beneath it was a bench, placed there perhaps as a lark by the detachment put in charge of building the hospital. There sat a soldier taking a rest.

“Care for a smoke, friend?”

It was the soldier whose face was wrapped in bandages. The end of his cigarette glowed red in the tree’s heavy shadow. His mouth was covered, making it appear as though the cigarette was being smoked through the dressing. I sat on the bench next to him and took a cigarette from the proffered pack. After putting the cigarette in my mouth, I looked down at my arm in the sling and realized I couldn’t strike a match. Noticing my predicament, the man lit another cigarette, took a pull on it, and held it out in my direction. The first drag in weeks made my head spin. The last time I’d smoked was the night in the foxhole.

“It tastes strange.”

“I bought it at the canteen in Kokopo. It’s an acquired taste.”

The man named Sanada was a private and twenty-one, like me. When they’d made land at Buna, rather than commence the march inland, his unit was tasked with building roads at Giruwa.

“I’m no engineer. Never figured I’d be humping a pickaxe on a construction job.”

Sanada tilted his chin and blew out a stream of smoke.

“After a couple of weeks, we got our marching orders inland. Loaded up with plenty of food supplies. I guess supplies to the frontline have been lagging. We got ambushed by some guerillas in the jungle, and this is my honorable wound in battle.”

He pointed at his right eye hidden in the gauze.