It is 1939. Japan has captured Manchuria and is fighting to conquer the rest of China. Toshio, a poor farmer conscripted two years before, has seen too much of a war that will eventually destroy his soul.
THE THOUSAND-STITCH BELT
We marched north, toward the place called Manchukuo. As it had done many times before, my hand slipped beneath my tunic to touch the thousand-stitch belt sewn by my mother, meant to ward off bullets.
The enemy we fought changed from skirmish to skirmish—Chang Kai-shek’s men one day, the communist forces the next. Or some war lord, if he’d been bribed with enough gold. Or bandits, looking to steal whatever they could get their hands on. Pack horses, used to carry supplies and communication wire, were a favorite target. I wondered which enemy it would be this time. Perhaps, with luck and darkness, we might evade detection entirely, at least until we arrived at our target, a bridge that had changed hands twice in as many months.
Single-file, we made our way along a narrow path through what recently had been a battlefield. Tanks had churned up the ground, making our progress difficult. Although no one spoke, the total silence of one hundred-fifty men passing through the moon-lit night was not possible. A twig snapped. Fabric rubbed against fabric. A rifle butt clinked against a canteen. Someone slipped and uttered a whispered curse.
We were given a signal to take a ten minute rest. I collapsed beneath a broken and leafless tree, my rifle cradled in my lap. Silhouetted above me, the tree looked like a creature from the netherworld. In the night sky, stars shone brightly, many of the same stars and constellations that shone above my home country. I thought of home and tried to picture my parents and my younger brother. Even though it had been only a few months since my last home leave, already their faces had begun to fade.
***
Two years before, as a new recruit, I’d been sent to China in time to take part in the battle for Shanghai. Shanghai fell quickly. It was a jubilant time —there’d been mass celebrations with barrel upon barrel of sake. I’d just turned nineteen and was proud to be part of freeing China from the grip of the West. After Shanghai, we began the push through the Yangtze River valley to the capital city of Nanking. I felt invincible. We all felt invincible.
Nanking was a nightmare. Women, young and old, were raped again and again, killed, their bodies mutilated. Men were beaten and tortured then made to kneel so their heads could be cut off, sending streaming gouts of blood into the air. Worst of all were the babies, ripped from their mothers’ arms and impaled on the ends of bayonets. Their pathetic, agonized cries filled my ears. I prayed for the blood-letting and the tortured screaming to end, but both went on and on until I wanted to smash my own skull against a wall.
A soldier in another platoon, who’d gone to a missionary school and could read English, had somehow gotten hold of an American newspaper that claimed the Japanese government denied the brutal torture and killing of nearly three-hundred thousand Chinese civilians in Nanking. Despite the soldier’s cleverness in keeping the newspaper hidden from superiors, it was found.
