Terminal Repentance
By Titus Green
Those who cannot forgive others break the bridge over which they themselves must pass.
(Confucius)
The staff at Tokyo’s Kitasato Hospital trying to save Mr. Nakamura’s life couldn’t understand. He was the only patient in their packed COVID wards trying to thwart their efforts to save his life. When he had enough strength, he would pull off his oxygen mask and attempt to remove the intravenous drips feeding his veins relief from thrombosis. When the nurses remonstrated with him, he mustered all the limited power available in his weakening lungs and shouted at them to let him die.
“This is how I should die. It is right. Do not interfere with natural justice!” he wheezed indignantly as nurses and interns restrained him and reattached his breathing apparatus. “Do not deny me this just death.”
One of his nurses, Yasuko, was fed-up with this tiresome old man whose baffling behaviour had confounded the medics in this overstretched hospital. They were barely coping with soaring COVID admissions, twenty-hour shifts, bodies piling up in cold storage units, increasing infections of staff and diminishing oxygen supplies that corresponded with diminishing morale. Most patients wept tears of gratitude when they were nursed out of the virus’ death-grip, and family members dispensed with typical Japanese restraint and social distancing when their loved ones had been saved and hugged the doctors and nurses. These people, who had escaped the pathogen’s death-sentence, vented their gratitude for life and yet this cantankerous old creature, with his shrivelled, mole-covered face and tufts of decaying hair carried on crying out his death wish. Naturally, it upset some of the surrounding patients. Had this centenarian of 104 no consideration?
“Nakamura San, you are very ill. You have the COVID virus, and your health is fragile. Please take the oxygen and let us do our work to preserve your life.” She spoke to him through her visor, with the mist of her uninfected breath clouding the transparent plastic. He was conscious and breathing in the oxygen in slow, faltering intakes. He turned his head towards her and challenged her with his narrowed eyes, which made his face as inscrutable and unsettling as a Noh theatre actor’s sneering mask. His haughty stare seemed to say: What the hell do you know, you silly young woman?
She was shocked to learn later that he was actually Dr. Nakamura.
“It’s true. He took his doctorate in medicine in the nineteen thirties,” said Hiroshi, one of the recently graduated young doctors doing his internship during the pandemic. Yasuko liked the young doctor with well-cut cheekbones and passion for his work. He was the most dedicated of the new doctors, and he had the most empathy with the patients.
“Really? Where did he train?” asked Yasuko as she clasped a helping of rice from her bento box in her chopsticks. They were having their twenty-minute lunchbreak in the hospital’s staff cafeteria, with their personal protective equipment dumped in boxes outside. The chairs and tables reeked of sanitizer. Hiroshi was sipping a coffee.
“At Kyoto Imperial University. He majored in Biology and, according to the internet, he specialized in Virology.”
Yasuko gasped, incredulous at the irony. “Then you’d think he’d be behaving more sensibly than he has been,” she said looking at Hiroshi with the certainty that he’d be a good husband. If only he could notice her growing affection.
“And what’s with his perverse desire to die by COVID? I get it that he’s ancient, and life is probably miserable for him with his arthritis, prostate problems, cataracts etc. I can understand he might have days when it seems better just to end it all, but dying from this virus, suffocating to death in this terrible way? If it’s euthanasia he wants, this is not the right way is it Dr Yamamoto?”
“Certainly not. We’ve both seen enough patients die from this contagion. The agony on some of their faces has given me sleepless nights,” said the young doctor.
“He doesn’t seem senile. And the team that assessed him said that he doesn’t have dementia, right?”
“No, he doesn’t,” answered Hiroshi. “In fact, his mental faculties are exceptionally sharp for his age.”
“You can say that again,” she replied, taking a sip of water. “Last week he lectured me on the mechanism of the anticoagulants I was giving him and now it’s clear how he knows this stuff. He then told me sternly that I was to stop giving him all medications. That he doesn’t want any more treatment and wants to ‘feel the virus burning through him’.”
“You know that he refused the vaccine as well?” said Hiroshi.
“I don’t believe it!” she gasped, hoping that he’d notice the soft texture of her cheeks and the glints of encouragement in her eyes. “An anti-vaxxer as well.”
“We haven’t been able to trace any next of kin,” said Hiroshi. “But according to Wikipedia, he was a big name in bacteriology in the nineteen sixties who carried out cutting-edge research at the University of Tokyo. He won some prestigious awards and even consulted for the Ministry of Public Health for a while.”
“I wonder what he did during the war,” said Yasuko dreamily while staring past Hiroshi into the puzzling void of Dr. Nakamura’s past. After speaking it, she noticed the accusatory flavour of her sentence that was instinctive, that couldn’t be spoken in any other way. It blew into the dark mist obscuring this cantankerous COVID welcomer’s life story that couldn’t cover his secrets forever.
“He was in Manchuria,” said Hiroshi.
Yasuko, whose journalist grandfather had written harrowing stories about the Imperial Army’s Chinese atrocities that editors had consistently spiked, went numb. She put down her cup of water slowly. Hiroshi noticed the paleness on his colleague’s face and attributed it to the typical caregiver fatigue during the pandemic.
***
Typhoid, cholera, syphilis and bubonic plague. These punishments of nature were my speciality diseases, and I grew to love them as if they were my children. It was my duty to nurse them, nurture them and make them as potently destructive as possible. By 1945, I doubt there was anybody more gifted in the husbandry of pestilence than me.
When I graduated with first class honours and commendations in 1937, I entered the Imperial Army’s medical corps just after Japan annexed China. My academic acumen had been noticed, and I was told my knowledge of infectious diseases was going to be critical in helping to protect our troops as they fought the enemy and brought glorious Nippon and imperious Hirohito closer to victory. Our soldiers were fighting in various theatres of war, such as jungles in South-East Asia where they were vulnerable to malaria. My mission was to make them invincible, like supermen.
However, to achieve victory we had to be ingenious. The enemy’s numbers were greater than ours, so we had to combat them with inferior manpower. However, we had superior technology and science! At the siege of Wuhan in 1938, I was a captain in the Chemical Weapons Corps and organised the consignments of nerve gas to the front. I advised on preparing the compounds and even won commendations for making the delivery methods more effective. I helped design the aerosol munitions that we launched from our giant howitzers. I’ll never forget watching the Chinese soldiers through my field glasses squirming like maggots after we’d smothered them in poison from our artillery and planes. It was satisfying to see the enemy writhing in agony. Each spasm and convulsion in a Chinese body was equal to a successful sword thrust, and each death was like scoring a goal in our divine soccer match.
I had special instructions from Tokyo: I was to conduct autopsies on Chinese killed by the nerve agents and collect tissue samples. Certain data was necessary, such as the nerve agent’s effects on certain internal organs. We had a special field hospital outside Wuhan’s perimeter where I did my dissections. We also had a specially built chamber where we would seal survivors of the gas attacks and give them additional doses to finish them off, carefully observing how they died and timing their deaths. We even did some trials on prisoners with mustard gas to compare its effects with other biological agents and the results were interesting. However, our emperor sought a silent weapon much more devastating than these trifling chemicals with which to conquer the world, and I knew I might be one of those honoured with the task of developing it.
The war wasn’t all work and hardship. Juxtaposed with the debris, corpses and smouldering ruins of the cities we vanquished we were well-provisioned for comfort. We had geishas, sake by the truckload and comfort stations which operated with great efficiency.
After some time in this posting, I received a message by morse code from the great general Araki himself. It said that I was being transferred to the North-East to a special research facility outside Harbin called the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army to carry out ‘vital work for the destiny of the nation and emperor.’ I was told to report to an Assistant Surgeon General holding the rank of major-general called Shiro Ishii.
I remember being on the plane which transported me to the Pinfang district, the location of my new office. I looked down on the muddy, mustard-coloured landscape with its bleak beauty and at the wretched hamlets dotted sparsely across the terrain. These people were hundreds of years behind us, living like darkage savages. Their country was my personal petri dish, and they were the expendable resources of our emperor. I was curious to know what my new assignment would be and was eager to get to work.
Major-general Ishii arranged a basic welcoming banquet for the new personnel and then convened a short meeting in the assembly hall. He spoke tersely and demanded concision and brevity from his junior officers when they spoke to him. He interrupted those he considered too verbose and generally dispensed with most social pleasantries. He was a pragmatic man motivated by results. A typical business executive who had a schedule to meet. He assembled us around a large table on which he’d provided a few decanters of good quality cognac.
“Gentlemen and fellow officers,” he said with a stentorian voice. “You have been selected for your special talents which will bring about the ultimate victory that is our nation’s destiny.” He walked among us while speaking, making eyecontact with everybody. I lowered my gaze when he looked at me in accordance with my junior rank, but still noticed the burning fanaticism in his gaze. “Biological weapons will be our divine katanas forged in Amaterasu’s furnace. Without them, we will never defeat the British or expand into China. Your job is to sharpen their blades, but you must do it quickly because there is not much time.”
Ishii assigned each of us specialists a particular pathogen to investigate, cultivate and weaponize to its maximum potential. Specifically, he wanted it more infectious and harmful to humans. My colleague Major Sato was given anthrax, while Captain Tomihara’s responsibility was typhoid. The aged Colonel Takahashi was given cholera while the supreme bringer of death and medieval champion of suffering, plague, was given to me. I felt a tremendous honour to be working with such awesome bacteria. Ishii wanted weekly reports and most of all results. I must say our working conditions at Unit 731, which was our official designation, were first class. I had a state-of-the-art laboratory with the most up-to-date microscopes and our laboratories were specially equipped with gurneys with reinforced straps with which to restrain the maruta if they struggled. We also had strong, obedient porters to transport the human logs (our test subjects) from the cells and a well-organised Kempeitai military police to bring us fresh samples when our stockpile was low. They were very efficient, and I had a good working relationship with Sergeant Satori, who took care of resupply. I couldn’t fault the logistics.
My first task was to compare plague transmissibility paths to establish the most reliable and cost-effective way to infect as many Chinese as possible. My starting point was reviewing the methods of one of biological warfare’s great pioneers, the British military commander Jeffery Amherst who ingeniously gifted blankets and clothes which had been exposed to smallpox to the rebelling American Indians in the Pontiac wars. The results were impressive, but admittedly only by 18th-century standards. I tried his old-school technique using some of our infected fleas and had our orderlies enter the maruta’s cells with blankets and prison uniforms evenly distributed with the pathogen-bearing parasites. I wasn’t particularly impressed. About 40% of the sample sickened within two weeks and only 15% developed the necessary fever and buboes. I had the living subjects brought to me and I cut them open to get some tissue analysis. We were not permitted to use anaesthetic, so the constant screaming of the maruta made it difficult to work to the extent that I had to have gags put over their mouths. It was messy but necessary work. I was despondent after this first set of trials. Crestfallen, I sent my report to Major-General Ishii and two days later I was summoned to his office.
“Why the miserable face?” he asked with intense concern, as though the slightest concession to failure in us, his scientific samurai, was terrifying to him.
“Perseverance is a key Bushido principle. Don’t forget that.” He told me to explore other techniques, but to be quick because we were now at war with the United States. It was 1941.
After this initial setback, I assessed and adjusted my research goals: I wanted to determine the extent of survivability for the vaccinated vs non-vaccinated exposed to plague, refine its delivery methods and engineer different strains of the pathogen. Naturally, I had to up my work-rate. I pulled in more all-nighters while my ‘rivals’ Sato and Tomihara got drunk with the geishas and whored in the city. I needed more blood serum, so ordered more marutas to be brought so that I could relieve them of their entire blood supplies like a vampire whose thirst couldn’t be quenched. Dr. Yoshimura, the respected frostbite expert who’d learned so much about treating hypothermia by having several subjects left out in minus 40 degrees and thawing them, joked that I was turning into Dracula. For my focus on transmission optimization, I adapted some techniques used by my good colleague Dr. Tanaka who was investigating wound trauma effects from grenade and mortar rounds by tying the maruta to stakes out in the fields and detonating the munitions at varying distances from the subjects. For this experiment, I used one of the testing fields a few kilometres away from our central complex for safety reasons, since the possibility of wind carrying the bacteria towards us was an independent variable impossible to control. From our bacteria production factory in Division 4 (an amazing facility that could produce over 300 kilograms of plague medium culture per month) I had the bacteria liquified and poured into the same spraying tanks attached to our planes that were frequently filled with anthrax spores and sprayed on local crops and villages under the direction of Major Sato, who was preparing to publish his results in the Tokyo Medical Journal, which naturally gave me a tinge of jealousy.
For my trial, I used a single-blind test methodology. Fifty percent of the subjects were given a vaccine and fifty were not. All of the prisoners were sprayed by the aircraft from a height of approximately 100 feet in three to four passes. I and my subordinates observed from a distance of about 400 metres while wearing protective suits and respirators. After a week nearly all the unvaccinated subjects developed symptoms, while only about two percent of the vaccinated did. My subordinates did not know who had or had not been vaccinated when they carried out their dissections and took tissue samples. This test provided valuable insights into how the pathogen and host interacted and Ishii commented favourably on my work. However, he was still convinced that fleas would be the optimum transmission medium, as they were in Europe during the Black Death. What concerned the major-general was that dropping the fleas en masse from certain altitudes would not be effective because they would be dispersed too widely. Recent tests around Guangzhou had confirmed this.
He raised his voice: “Unless we can expose as many Chinese to as much of the pathogen in one instant, we have lost this critical advantage!” He turned his back to me and looked out of his window at the small Shinto shrine erected by the quadrangle. His comment made me apprehensive because I wasn’t sure if it was a general exhortation to all of us attached to Unit 731 to increase our efforts or a personal criticism. His statements were frequently ambiguous. I looked at him, with his hands clasped behind his back. The tension in his instinctive military posture was clear. I wasn’t just looking at a mere man, but a living statue of leadership chiselled from the granite of destiny. I was in awe. He turned around and I lowered my gaze.
“Find me a foolproof way of spreading this plague and your future is assured,” he said. I kept the general’s tantalizing suggestion of my professional rewards secret and over the next few days focused on finding the perfect transmission medium for our perfect weapon. I read through plague literature meticulously and scrutinized our experimental data for hours. I was at my desk one night scouring over some historical texts in English from our library when I came across a passage about an incident in medieval Europe when a Tartar army was besieging a fortress of Genoese merchants at Caffa, on the Black Sea, in 1346. Ravaged by the Black Death, the Tartars shared their biological misery with their enemy by catapulting infected corpses over the Italian fortress walls and the effects were devastating. In this way, the greatest plague in history said hello to Europe! We couldn’t drop infected, deceased maruta from planes because our aircraft weren’t large enough to carry sufficient quantities of cadavers. However, if we were to pack enough infected fleas into vessels that would shatter on impact with the ground, or were detonated close to the ground, then the results in densely populated areas could be spectacular. I conducted some tests with special porcelain bombs, and the signs were encouraging. I presented my proposal to Ishii, and he approved it immediately. He told me to go and test my hypothesis without delay, which I did with a small team of my most able assistants.
We selected a group of villages about 100km away from us in the area of Changshan. We visited the towns beforehand to carry out a census and assess the health of the populations. Shortly after, I sent in a number of our aircraft to drop the experimental bombs. We did this at night so as not to arouse suspicion in the people and to conceal the breaking of the bombs. We drove to the villages in trucks disguised as ambulances ten days later, which was the approximate timeframe in which most deaths occur from exposure. I will never forget the atmosphere as we approached these villages. The signs of the people’s suffering were everywhere. Dead cattle and mangy, emaciated dogs were either littering the roads or hobbling miserably to find places to expire. As we drove into the neighbourhoods, we witnessed peasants pushing carts of bodies, their faces gaunt and feverish under their conical farming hats. I felt incredibly powerful being the agent that inflicted this on them and having the knowledge of their impending deaths made me as omnipotent as a god. Behold the power of bacteriological weapons! The loudspeakers on our trucks told the people, in Mandarin Chinese, that we had come to help them. To treat them as doctors and give them medicine. Come to our triage tables we told them, and we will diagnose you. And they came willingly, not suspecting anything was wrong when they saw us in our ghostly anti-contamination suits drifting through the mist like phantoms of death.
When we arrived, the plague was busy destroying the inhabitants. Teams of men were carrying the dead on improvised stretchers to improvised mass graves. We saw a large pit a few metres deep where the corpses covered in boils were accumulating. It seemed the sickest were inside their homes, prostrate, weak and wheezing towards death with their families surrounding them and getting infected. The results exceeded my expectations. We entered homes of the dying and ejected their families and friends, telling them that only special surgery could save their loved ones and that we needed to operate with privacy. The first subject we cut open was too weak to resist and merely groaned when we made our incisions. We took some of the organs for examination in our lab and told the relatives outside that their family member was deceased and that an autopsy was necessary. When my team entered the second house, a little girl of about seven was sitting outside crying. As she was weeping, she saw us approach her home.
“Please help my mama. Make her better please mister.” I saw in her teary, innocent little eyes a mass of fragile hopes manifesting based on her belief in my skills and kindness as a doctor. I was a good man, in her trusting mind, who was going to make her mamma better. Mother would be back in the kitchen soon making her favourite snacks again because of me. She ran up to me and repeated her plea, sobbing more. She was about the same age as my daughter in Japan. I couldn’t give any fake reassuring smiles through my hood and goggles, so I just nodded and raised my hand. We entered her home, stationing sentries outside. I went about my work on her mother and the procedure took about an hour. As we scrubbed the blood off our smocks, I felt the presence of something that had been alien to me for years. It was an emotional impact known as shame: I had made a promise to a little girl, a dying girl whom the bacteria was soon going to claim, that I was going to make her mummy better. A little girl, and not a maruta. I didn’t have the strength to face her outside but knew that I would. It was destined.
I exited the home and, on seeing me, a hopeful, excited smile came over the little girl’s face. She jumped up and ran towards me. “Will my mummy get better doctor?” she asked. I winced on hearing the question, thinking of her mother’s eviscerated corpse within, as if a mighty god of conscience that judged with natural law had finally sent me an awakening blow. I tried to walk away, get to the trucks and order the driver to get us away quickly but it was too late. I was ordering subordinates to get our equipment loaded when I felt her stare upon me. I turned around. Her home was about 50 yards away and she had come out of the house. She was ashen-faced, looking at me like the ghost that she would soon become. Her eyes looked both at me and beyond me, as though she was unable to comprehend that one living man could be so incredibly evil and that I was the possessed host of a demonic spirit guiding my wickedness. Her expression transfixed me, and as we drove away, I saw the faint outline of a benign spiritual presence descend and cradle her.
I continued with my scientific homicide, but only on sufferance. I now sensed the agony and grief of my victims. There were not logs, but humans. Something had happened in Changshan that had not only uncovered my humanity but also forced me in front of a mirror of conscience that showed the most horrifying reflection. Ishii demanded to take credit for the fragile flea-bomb invention, even though we were losing the war. The Soviet army, like a vast, vengeful bear was stomping towards us bearing its armoured claws. Shortly before Hiroshima got the atom bomb, Ishii ordered the complete destruction of our facility in Pengfang and the execution of all remaining prisoners with the intention of disguising our crimes. We fled south covertly, like the murdering villains we were, but not before I had managed to sequester some damning evidence for future disclosure. Some of it I concealed and took back to Japan, and some of it I planted in the ruins of the complex for investigators to find.
Of course, we couldn’t hide forever in Japan. After the Military Tribunal for the Far East began in Tokyo in 1946, the Americans came looking for us following reports of our evil deeds in Manchuria. The Soviets were also particularly keen to apprehend us. It was at this time that the most demonic deal imaginable was struck, a serpentine bargain that finally slithered out of its cage of official secrecy and became known to the world in the 1980s. Ishii managed to use our ‘research data’ as a bargaining chip with the Americans who granted us immunity from prosecution in return for our genocidal test results. I couldn’t stand watching Ishii gloat how the American bio-warfare specialists at Fort Detrick were ‘salivating so much at the prospect of getting their hands on our crown jewels that would be our passports to immunity.’ I hated myself for respecting this beast so much before. What kind of immoral spell had I been under? For this agreement with the Americans, we had to sign what they would call in the 21st century a non-disclosure agreement. However, I kept mental notes of the details and the names of the high priests involved in this sacrifice of justice. After this, the victims of my experiments in Manchuria began barging into my dreams and turning them into nightmares with increasing frequency. Their mutilated bodies and confused, death mask expressions became a ghastly collage I was forced to confront in my sleep each night, projected through the camera obscura of my guilt. Each presentation of my deeds finished with the little girl from Changshan facing me with an accusatory stare and the question why? coming from her trembling lips. They continued for years, crying out for justice.
***
Yasuko and Hiroshi watch Nakamura through their masks and visors. They are joined by critical care nurses, one of whom has brought a portable defibrillator. Nakamura, emaciated, tiny and pale is close to death. His oxygen mask is attached to his face with elastic tape. He breathes but isn’t conscious and his blood oxygen levels have plummeted. Each feeble quarter breath requires more energy and effort than he has left to spare. Before slipping into this semi-coma, he had asked to dictate the following message to Yasuko:
My name is Haruko Nakamura, born August 29th 1917 in Chiba Prefecture. I was formerly Captain Nakamura, bacteriologist physician attached to Unit 731 stationed in Penfang, near Harbin in Manchuria from 1941 to 1945. Our mission was to develop bacteriological weapons, using innocent Chinese citizens as test subjects, in preparation for a massive pre-emptive attack on the Soviet Union using bacteriological weapons. I was personally responsible for killing over 3,000 men, women and children (of several nationalities) and maiming and infecting thousands of others. I estimate that our actions were responsible for the deaths of at least 500,000 people. Despite the scale of this homicide, justified ‘in the name of science’, only 12 murderers associated with the Unit 731 death factories stood trial in Khabarovsk in 1949 after being arrested by Russian soldiers. The rest of us were granted immunity from war crimes prosecution by the U.S. government in return for our precious data written in the ink of misery. We had to swear not to reveal the details of this despicable bargain to anyone. Most of us lived prosperously after the war, having our crimes concealed and denied by successive governments of both countries.
In the safety deposit box of a branch of the Sumitomo Bank in Shinjuku-Ku I have left several documents. One identifies the executors in Washington of the secret deal that pardoned us in 1946 and the other contains details of some of the viruses we let loose on the populations of Wuhan and elsewhere later in the war. Some of the data on virus-host interactions could be useful in combatting the mutant strains of the COVID 19 virus that is now killing me so appropriately. I have granted the nurse who dictated this message power of attorney to locate this information and share it with the global media for peace, justice and reconciliation. Now please let this virus do its worst and be my victims’ sword of vengeance.
Yasuko and Hiroshi see Dr Nakamura’s lips twitch and form inaudible words. “Please forgive,” he mutters to the Manchurian phantoms gathered around his bed. Beside him, the little girl from Changshan looks into his eyes benevolently and nods. They vanish, and Nakamura breathes his last breath.
*
Titus Green was born in Canada but grew up in the UK. His fiction, non-fiction and prose poetry have appeared in numerous online and print magazines, including The Collidescope, Adelaide Literary Magazine, HORLA, Literally Stories, Sediments Literary Arts, Fear of Monkeys, Stag Hill Literary Journal, The Chamber, S.A.V.A Press, The Rye Whiskey Review, Empty Sink Publishing and The Font. He teaches English as a foreign language for a living.
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