The Flowering of Racial Spirit/The Eye
The Eye (Novelette)
Although it could not be called a yard, there was a little space between the hospital buildings, with five or six mango trees spreading their branches over it, and the ground was covered with a lawn of green grass, thus it was very pleasant to stroll around and take a rest there. In the daytime, by the dazzling ray of the scorching sun, the white clothes and the loin-cloths and the handkerchiefs, that were being hung to dry out on the lines between the mango trees, glittered with pinpoints of dazzling light. But at night it suddenly became cool from dusk, and before one was aware of it, the yard would be crowded with soldier-patients in white clothes. At the time when I entered the hospital the moon was large. When there are other objects where the moon rises, it looks to us to be extraordinarily large, and just when we were seeing it from where we were lying down on the ground, the moon rose up between our hospital building and one of the mango trees. The moon, which showed her face above the roof in the street outside the fence of the hospital ground, enlarged its size fully among the walls of the hospital building, the roofs, and the mango trees; shining brilliantly, it rose up gradually higher and higher. At the same time, the moon which was beyond the network of the iron fence of the hospital, seemed just like a radiant rice-cake on the toasting net. And the moon now shone in reddish colour, then in yellowish colour. As the large moon rose up towards the zenith it seemed to shrink into a smaller size.
When my temperature went down, I went out every night, and lying down on the lawn, I used to look up at the moon. The cool feeling and the odour of grass lured me to stay there for a long time. I acquired one more new acquaintance on that lawn. Although I had a mosquito-net in the sick-room, we did not have one on the lawn, and I was bitten, too, by mosquitoes there. Originally, almost all of the patients here were soldiers who were suffering from fevers because they were bitten by mosquitoes in the battlefields of Bataan. And I myself, too, of course, was of a similar case. I heard from persons who had stayed in Manila for a long time that although most of them stayed here for about ten years, they had scarcely heard of dengue fever or malaria. Considering this fact, the mosquitoes which carry the virus of malaria and dengue fever are not found in Manila, but only in Bataan Peninsula. Therefore, it seems that we are safe even if we are bitten by mosquitoes in Manila. There is nothing more abominable than such tropical fevers as endemics of Bataan. I suffered from a fever of forty-two degrees for three days, and I kept rolling over and over day and night, and I could not sleep at all. I felt so painful that every joint of my body seemed to break apart, and in whatever posture I might lie the pain did not leave me. I wanted to replenish the ice in my ice-bag, but I could not walk at all because my legs were so wobbly that the knee-joints seemed to be disjointed. My body was very hot as if it were a ball of fire, and my mouth was dried out and became without a bit of saliva. My appetite was lost, and I scarcely ate anything for even a week, and in spite of injections and takings of medicine my fever did not go down until the customary time-limit of the subsiding of fever. Nevertheless, my head became wonderfully very clear, and I could not enjoy a wink of sleep even after midnight toward daybreak; visions which I had never had came into and went out from my mind one after another. The groaning due to the impossibility of enduring the pain came from other sick-rooms. Even the soldiers, who were brave under bullets and cannon shells, could not stand the fever.
On the other hand, once the fever subsided, we became so vigorous that we could not believe it, and we felt funny because we raved in delirium due to the fever. Those patients who gathered on the lawn invariably had experienced such cases, and they laughingly told each other, here and there, as follows: “Do you remember what you said at that time?” or, “You were weeping like a woman,” etc. We have a saying that “Sufferers of the same disease sympathize with each other”; just as the soldiers who went under the gun fires are united with a solid love for comrade, the patients, too, who suffered from the same kind of fever, immediately feel an intimacy and become very close to each other. On the lawn it seemed to be a regular occurrence every night that almost everyone of them began with a conversation about the pain and suffering when they were attacked by fever, and then, asked each other about the name of the corps to which they respectively belonged, their names and their native places; thus the patients who were strangers to each other became by degrees intimately related. On a certain night I also won an acquaintance in the same manner.
When I was about to fall in a doze on the lawn, I was awaked by a sudden piercing burst of laughter near my ears. A patient who was not there a short time before was lying directly near my head with his hands clasped beneath his head, had burst out into loud laughter. In the moonlight his white clothes were in relief like marble. Before I understood why he had burst out into laughter, the patient became aware of my awakening. He asked me, “Are you also suffering from dengue fever?” He seemed to be a still young soldier. I felt at ease in the presence of this jolly soldier, and I answered: “I don’t know if this is dengue, malaria, or merely a plain three-day fever. But my fever of forty-two degrees continued for three days.” “That is dengue fever,” he diagnosed with such a tone of self-confidence as if he were a doctor of medicine, and he suddenly rose to a sitting position. He continued, “Indeed, dengue is a ghostly fever. It may be a fever of Tengu.[1] I have been in Central and Southern China for three years, and I overdrove myself very much, but I never suffered from any disease, and I have had a perfect reliance on my physique. But after coming here, I at last became a victim of dengue.” “The case is quite the same with me,” I answered.
When we were lying down he seemed to be a very young soldier, but sitting up and facing me, his robust physique, the broadness of his shoulders, and his protruding cheek-bones displayed a wonderful stability of his figure even under the moonlight of that night. In spite of this, he seemed to be of a jovial nature, and his body was always in motion, and he talked about something almost continuously. Sometimes I was annoyed by him. I now understood the reason why he burst out into loud laughter a little while ago. At first I was not aware of it, but there was another patient lying beside him. It was at this patient that he laughed. I heard from him that this patient on his other side would, when he was suffering from a high fever, invarialy weep at midnight, “All is over for me. Oh, it is unbearable. Kill me, please!” He mimicked it in quite the same voice as his friend’s, and he added, “This fellow wept in spite of his huge body.” His voice was so loud that those other patients who were talking on the lawn stopped their conversations and turned to listen to him; and when the speaker’s voice reached that point where it resembled so much the other patient’s own voice, all the listeners would burst out into loud laughter. Some of them even clapped their hands in applause. As the audience increased, the speaker became more and more enthusiastically voluble, and he repeated the same words many times. He was getting a little tedious so I said, “We have already heard that story quite enough.” And only then did he stop. He did not especially ridicule his comrade, but being firmly confident that such a story must be of common interest to all the patients around him who were suffering from the same disease, he might be only exaggerating his own experience. But considering the patient who was the subject of that story, I could not suppress a certain growing feeling of indignation. While the speaker was at the height of his mimicry, I observed the large figure of the other patient who was lying on his back beside the voluble one. Though I could not see him clearly, because of the darkness of night, he was lying with the fingers of both his hands interlaced on his forehead as if he were hugging his head. He also seemed to be laughing at the tone of the mimicry of his companion. Although he heard his companion making public the incident during his being attacked by high fever, which he cannot be proud of, he seemed to be absolutely confident in the goodwill of his companion. And he seemed to understand also that such a behaviour was not an extraordinary experience peculiar to himself only, and his innocent blunder in that degree can be readily tolerated, without any explanation or excuse, by sufferers from the same disease. Moreover, in spite of his suffering from high fever, he seemed to feel himself quite laughable because he uttered such unexpected words. I felt all these things from the sound of his low and rather happy-go-lucky laughter. At the same time, I noticed that his head was bandaged as if he were wearing a headband. All the patients who were wounded in battle were confined in the main hospital, and in this branch hospital were the patients who contracted diseases during the battle. So I thought that he was wounded by some other accident during his confinement here due to dengue fever. At that time, I did not especially give much heed to his wound. But as the bandage seemed to cover his right eye, that fact remained in my mind even after I had gone back to my room. I knew not how it was, but the white bandage which I saw in the moonlight lingered for a long time in my vision.
On the evening of the next day, the eloquent patient of the previous night greeted me in my sick-room. The hospital building where he was confined was about two tyō (about thirty-six meters) away from our hospital building. Our hospital building was situated in the southernmost part of the compound, and his hospital building was in the northernmost part. He brought me a half of the melon which was presented to him by the headquarters of his troop for his consolation. Fortunately, in the afternoon of that day we were given some cigarettes as additional ration. So I gave them to him. He at once opened the package and, fishing out and lighting a cigarette, he smoked a first puff delightfully. And he said, “A package of these cigarettes is sold for eighty centavos in the streets.” Since we entered the city of Manila, the prices have risen up higher and higher, and the price of the cigarettes which were at first sold for ten centavos, is said to have risen to eighty centavos within several months only. I, who do not smoke, was apt to be careless about such a thing, but to smokers, that seemed to be a matter of importance every day. But afterwards, even I was surprised to hear that Lucky Strike, which cost twenty centavos a package rose up to ₱2.50, and Camel which was fifteen centavos became ₱2.20. “As the price of cigarettes is so high that the salary of soldiers like us is not enough even to buy cigarettes,” he said, “Toyosima, who is more fond of cigarettes than I, is harder pressed.” The name of the eloquent patient was Nogami, and his companion, whose head was bandaged, was a soldier called Toyosima. Both of them were first privates of an undisclosed corps. “Last night, when we went back to our rooms, we promised each other to come here today and converse with you, but today at about noon we went to swim in the pool and Toyosima’s fever came back, and he now lies sick in bed. Now his fever is not so high, but if the fever becomes higher he will be troublesome.” First Private Nogami laughed, puffing out smoke rings cleverly. The two companions were confined in adjoining rooms. This hospital occupies the former building of the Y.M.C.A., and a fine swimming pool is constructed in the court. If the temperature of patients subsides to normal, and when they seem to have recovered, I am told, they are usually tested by swimming in this pool. Then, the patients whose fever does not return are permitted to leave the hospital. He said that today the two of them swam together, but First Private Toyosima seemed not to be quite well as yet, and his fever came again. Suddenly, the figure of First Private Toyosima, with his bandaged head, appeared before my eyes, but I saw him in the darkness last night, so I did not know how his face looked like. If it were not for the bandage around his head, perhaps I could not have recognized him even if we met at the corridor. At any rate, it was rather improper to swim with his wound still in bandage. Hearing my remark about that point, First Private Nogami said, laughing, “He is the son of a fisherman. He can swim in any turbulent waters without getting wet above his chin.” I asked him about the thing which had been in my mind since last night. And First Private Nogami answered calmly, “Oh, are you asking about his bandage? One of his eyes was wounded by a fragment of cannon shell.” When I wanted to ask more detail about it, the door opened and a Filipino nun entered into my room to inject me. Sister Francisca, dressed in her white habit and a white hat shaped like outstretched wings, and with her usual calm and gentle smile, searched for the vena in my left arm, with the asistance of the nurse on duty. Several nuns came to this hospital to volunteer their services, and after the patients had recovered their normal temperature, the nuns injected them with grape-sugar every day for a certain length of time. As she was not a specialist along this line, the nun betrayed an uncertainty in the movements of her hands when inserting the injecting syringe into the flesh of my arm, and even after the insertion she searched for the vena with the point of the needle several times. “Is she still injecting?” said First Private Nogami, who was observing the procedure. He seemed suddenly to have noticed the shadow on the yard outside of the window indicating the setting of the sun, and he went out, saying, “It is already time for supper. I’ll come again.”
After that evening, First Private Nogami came frequently to pass the time with me. And I asked him more particulars about his companion. He said, “First Private Toyosima suffered from a fever of thirty-eight degrees on the night of the day when we swam in the pool, but after that his fever subsided lower and lower each day. I think he will recover his normal temperature soon. After that, he said, he will come with me to your room, but with a temperature of thirty-eight degrees, even he himself did not weep out ‘Kill me, please!’ ” And that jovial soldier laughed.
Later, at some time, he brought to me a sheet of letter-paper with some writings on it, which were Waka or Japanese poems in thirty-one syllables, about dengue fever, written by First Private Toyosima, the essence of which is as follows:
| (1) | “Although I was certain that I only would not suffer from any disease, dengue fever attacked me seriously and I groaned for three or four days.” |
| (2) | “I roll about because I suffer from great pains in every joint of my body, and I can scarcely manage my bulky physique.” |
| (3) | “When I am groaning because of my pains, it seems as if some persons were drinking wine before a turning electric fan in the adjoining room.”
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| (4) | “I wake up in the night but I have nobody to talk with in my room, and inevitably cannot do anything but gaze at the electric lamp.” |
| (5) | “Dengue fever is an awful disease: its fever is very high, and I feel as if all the parts of my body were torn asunder.” |
| (6) | “If one suffers through pain after pain, it’s said, one can recover from the disease, and there is no good medicine for it: how wonderful a disease it is!”
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| (7) | “I felt as if the fever subsided a little when, for trial, I cried out in a loud voice; and so I cry out in a loud voice.” |
The above Japanese poems in thirty-one syllables written by First Private Toyosima, in Romanized Japanese, are as follows:
| (1) | Ware nomi wa |
| (2) | Husibusi no |
| (3) | Kurusisa ni |
| (4) | Yo o okite |
| (5) | Dengu to wa |
| (6) | Kurusimi te |
| (7) | Taisai o |
“This, indeed!” I smiled when I read the poem about the loud voice. First Private Nogami laughed, puffing out his cigarette smoke in rings. “Far from being a loud voice, it is like a wail of distress at the agonies of death.” There followed still more poems. First Private Nogami continued, “Toyosima is the son of a fisherman, but his father is a provident man, and he educated his son until the third year class of a middle school, so Toyosima is brought up as a man of fair taste.” We only felt a great interest at the fact that the soldier who is so vigorous and furious as to astound us at the battlefields, groans out such miserable cries of distress in such a place where cannon shells do not come. Because no one can call First Private Toyosima a coward.
On the hill to the west of Mabatang a serious battle was waged to assault Natib. Enemy positions fired toward us numberless cannon shells and rifle bullets poured like showers. The enemy troops were versed in the terrain and still our troops were small in number. Our soldiers, once having cut through the barbed wire entanglements, occupied the enemy trenches, but fell into a hard battle because of the counter-attack of enemy troops in several tenfold numbers. The commander of a section fell down, and one of the non-commissioned officers assumed the command of the section. Soldiers fell down one after another. As a squad leader fell dead. First Private Toyosima assumed the leadership of the squad. First Private Nogami belonged to an adjacent squad. The eyes of the soldiers were bloodshot, and they gripped their rifles with the bayonets fixed, so hard that it seemed they would break them. Even in such difficult situations they attempted to charge into the enemy troops. As a light machine-gunner fell down, First Private Toyosima took his place. He pulled the trigger quite calmly, sputtering the bullets at the enemy positions. A cannon shell exploded in the vicinity very close by him, pieces of the shell splattered about him, and one of them struck the face of First Private Toyosima. He fell down there with a low groan. First Private Nogami ran to the side of his comrade. In a little while First Private Toyosima lifted up his face which was stained with fresh blood. A piece of torn flesh was hanging out from his face, which was crimsoned with blood. His right eyeball was gouged out. Grasping the gouged eyeball with his right hand, he plucked it off from his face, crying, “Oh, it’s just an obstruction.” Having thrown it away, he pushed closely the butt of the light machine-gun against his right shoulder as if he were fixing it to his body. And as he was usually accustomed to, he began to aim with his right eye; but he instantly realized that he possessed no more his right eye, and said, “Damn it! It makes me laugh.” And he burst out into a loud and piercing laughter. He once more aimed with his left eye and pulled the trigger. With a pleasant sound the bullets flew out from the muzzle with fire. But a short time later, he fell down as if his strength had been exhausted. First Private Nogami, grasping the shoulders of his comrade, cried out, “Fall back!” First Private Toyosima answered, “I will never fall back!” He lifted his face again and, opening the bullet-box himself, re-loaded the gun. Seeing his demoniacal comrade still pulling the trigger with the fingers of his blood-stained hand, First Private Nogami felt a chill throughout his whole body. The bullets seemed to be flying out from both eye-sockets of his comrade. First Private Nogami was also slightly wounded by a cannon shell on his left shoulder. Communication having been reopened with the rear lines, reinforcements reached our position and the aspect of the battle became advantageous to us. A private of the Army Medical Corps came and wound a sling cloth around the head of First Private Toyosima, and forced him to fall back on a stretcher to a field first-aid station. A little while before evening that enemy battle position at Mabatang was occupied. It was then already twilight.
First Private Nogami told me this story three times from respectively different angles. During any of his other talks, if he happened to find some cue, he would start from that point and eventually repeat the story from the beginning to the end. His particularly husky voice, the loudness of his tone and, when he became excited by his own story now and then, the dislocation of the chronological order of events, made it frequently quite difficult for me to listen to him in the midst of his narration. But in his tone there was quite the same sound as when he was disclosing the delirious raving of his comrade on that moonlit night. After all, the fact that he spoke in the same tone whether he was abusing or admiring his comrade proved how deeply he loved his friend. He added lonesomely that as soon as Toyosima recovered from his fever he would be sent home. I was told that First Private Toyosima entered this hospital when the wound in his right eye was almost healed, and even the ship which he was to embark on was already determined. Nogami also told me, “Toyosima’s wound has already healed, but when his temperature is high the wound also seems to ache.” Lowering his tone in spite of his usual loud voice, he added, “Moreover, I know one thing which I do not tell anyone else. That is, when he is suffering from high fever and utters things in delirium, he invariably cries out, ‘Give me my eye! Give me my eye!’ in a tune like that of a song. In ordinary times he usually says, ‘One eye is good enough for me,’ pretending that he does not mind about his other eye. And yet, in reality it may not be so. His parents are sound and healthy, but he is unmarried. He is the only son and heir. I have four brothers and I am the third son, so I thought I could die at any time, but many of my comrades died while I remain still alive. Anyway, Toyosima only lost one of his eyes and it can be said that he is rather lucky. That, however, is only our own feeling, but for him it is not so, isn’t it? Therefore, I never tell anyone about his crying for his other eye during his delirium. Concerning this matter, moreover, I do not let him know that he says such a thing.” First Private Nogami, saying these, puffed out his cigarette smokes in rings at random as if he were irritated by something. I looked at his face. Even though he is very frank and at a glance, so to speak, he appeared flighty, First Private Nogami felt such a delicate concern about his comrade.
Furthermore, he added one more story. The battle at Mabatang was over and it was evening, and the incident happened when all the troops had assumed their respective lookout positions at the battlefield. First Private Nogami was on sentry duty. The wound inflicted on his shoulder by a fragment of cannon shell was not serious, so he only applied an adhesive plaster on his wound and stood on duty. All around him was in darkness even if stars were twinkling in the sky above. The Southern Cross was shining high up above Mount Mariveles, whose dark height was sprawling from east to west. The constellation queerly weighed on his mind, so now and then he looked up to it during his watch on the ground. Except for the sounds of rifle firing which were heard at times, all around him was still and in silence. When the grass rustled at a blast of the wind, he cocked his attention to it. Insects were also chirping. He did not know what time it was, but suddently he heard what sounded like footsteps. But it did not come from in front but from behind him. The footsteps approached and a dark figure appeared on the grassy underbrush. “Who goes there?” queried First Private Nogami in a low voice. The dark figure did not answer, but instead seemed to fall down on the grass. The sentry, suspecting some danger, pointed his bayonet and prepared his finger to pull the trigger, and asked once more, “Who goes there?” The dark figure stood up on the grass again and a voice was heard. “Are you Nogami?” It was the voice of First Private Toyosima. First Private Nogami was surprised, because this comrade, who was seriously wounded and should be lying at the field first-aid station, had come to such a sentry line at the front-most sector. A sentry could not leave his post, but instantly he remembered the place where First Private Toyosima was standing. It was the place where earlier in the day the troops had fought hard until the arrival of reinforcements, and where First Private Toyosima was wounded. At midnight, First Private Toyosima had stolen out from the field first-aid station and come here to look for the eye which he had plucked out and thrown away.
- (The 22nd day of July, 1942.)
- ↑ A long-nosed genie of the mountain in Japanese folk-tales.