Inheritors by Asako Serizawa

Author:Asako Serizawa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

FEW HISTORIANS have unearthed, let alone published, evidences of Pingfang’s abuses. Those who have done so have been divided over the problem of numbers. At one end, Pingfang’s casualty rate has been estimated at several thousand. At the other end, the number hovers closer to 200,000, mostly Chinese but some Russian and Japanese deaths as well. I believe both figures tell a truth. While our furnaces saw no shortage of logs in their six years of operation, our goal was never mass extermination. Our tests, contingent on the human body, its organic processes and upkeep, were costly, and even our field tests, aerial or onsite, were limited to small villages and hamlets optimally secluded for tracking our data. But Pingfang cannot be confined to its five years of operation. Its construction took two years, 15,000 laborers, 600 evictions; and afterward, when surrender triggered the destruction of the compound whose walls were so thick that special dynamite was needed, the final blasts are said to have released merely animals, the only witnesses to escape alive. And the gain? Militarily, history has shown the regrettable results, with rumors of biological weapons and unexplained outbreaks surfacing now and again, if only in the half-light of prevarications. Medically, it is harder to assess, our research having pushed our field to the cutting edge, landing many of us influential positions in the pharmaceutical sector, where some of us are still directing the course of medicine, or the money in medicine, in not insignificant ways.

The irony of it all is how well we ate within those walls, our maruta fed better than us to maintain optimal biological conditions. This prurient coupling of plenitude and death, so lavish in its complicity, has lent a kind of heat to my memory of Pingfang, compressing its eternity into a vivid blur coalesced around two towering chimneys, their twin shapes always looming, gone the moment I turn to look. These days it is this collusion of the mind with Pingfang’s irreality that terrorizes me, the fog of the entombed past threatening to release a hand, a face, a voice.

My colleagues are more fortunate. Our annual meals seem to have done them good, churning up old soil mineralized by the years, the new exposure letting them breathe. I, however, find myself hurtled back to people and places lost to time but not lost to me. At my age it is time that is present, its physicality reminding me of the finality of all our choices, made and lived.

This morning they deemed the story of the straggler a hoax: Captain Nakahira Fumio, whereabouts irrelevant.

And so it goes, all of us subject to the caprice of time as it releases not what we hoped for but what it does before it closes its fist and draws back, once again withdrawing the past from the present. And perhaps that is as it should be. For what would I have done had Captain Nakahira been my son? Would I have shown

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.