Unbroken_ A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption - Laura Hillenbrand [177]
The detectives were just feet away, on the other side of the door. His heart racing, Mutsuhiro tried to decide whether to run or to conceal himself here. The room was tiny, scattered with pillows, but there was a closet. Ever so slowly, he inched open the closet’s sliding door and squeezed inside. He decided not to close the door, fearing that it would make noise. He stood there, a hand clasped over his mouth to smother the sound of his breathing.
The door opened. A detective looked in. “You have plenty of room,” he said to the family. There was a pause as he looked about. If the detective turned his eyes toward the closet, he’d see Mutsuhiro. “It is tidy,” the detective said. The door closed. The detectives left.
Mutsuhiro had wished to stay overnight, but the close call changed his mind. He told his mother that he’d try to see her again in two years. Then he left, walking back, he wrote, “into the lonesome world.”
——
Watanabe returned to the village. The farmer’s son, unable to make a go of his leather strap sales, opened a coffee shop in the village. Watanabe became his waiter.
The farmer approached Watanabe with a proposition. Arranged marriage was still common in Japan, and the farmer had found a match for him. Watanabe was tempted; he was lonely and unhappy, and liked the idea of marrying. But marriage while in his predicament seemed impossible. He said no.
The young woman eventually came to him. When the farmer’s son fell ill, she paid him a visit, and Watanabe, curious, went into the sickroom to see her. He raised the subject of the novel that the farmer’s son was reading, thinking that, he wrote, “if she liked books, she must understand the mind and hardship of human life.” In his notes about the meeting, he didn’t say if she possessed that understanding, but he did seem to like her and thought she would be “a good house-keeper.” Part of him seemed to want to fall for her, and he believed that love “could save my daily life.”
The woman was taken with the attractive waiter, and began lingering in the coffee shop to be near him. He kept his identity secret from her. She began telling her parents about him in hopes of winning their blessing for a wedding. After brooding on her, Watanabe decided that he had to end the relationship. All he told her was that he had “a burden which would make her unhappy.”
With that, he broke with the tenuous existence that he had created in the village. He quit his job and left. He wandered onto a stretch of the Nagano grassland along the Chikuma River and took a job as a cowherd. His inability to control the willful animals exasperated him. He was despondent. At sunset, he lifted his eyes to the majestic Asama volcano, watching a ribbon of smoke unspooling from her upper reaches, the cattle grazing below.
——
In Japan’s Okuchichibu Mountains stands the holy peak of Mitsumine, its sides fleeced in forest, its summit ornamented with an ancient shrine. In the fall of 1946, two bodies were found amid the hollows and spines of the mountain, a pistol lying with them. One was a man, the other a woman. No one knew who they were.
The police went to Shizuka Watanabe and asked her and her family to accompany them to the mountain. The Watanabes were driven up to Mitsumine and, with the help of guides, taken to the bodies. Shizuka looked down at the lifeless form of the young man.
Japanese newspapers ran the sensational story: Mutsuhiro Watanabe, one of Japan’s most wanted men, was dead. He and a woman, probably a lover, had killed themselves.
* Some death sentences were later commuted; 920 men were eventually executed.
Thirty-seven
Twisted Ropes
LOUIE KNEW NOTHING OF THE DEATH OF THE BIRD. WHEN the bodies were found on Mount Mitsumine, he was in Hollywood, falling to