Sad Peninsula. Mark Sampson

      Dedication

      Dedicated to 2LT Gerald Arthur Moore

      Author’s Note

      This is a work of fiction. Any rendering of actual people — living or dead — is coincidental or done strictly for the purposes of fiction. Astute readers may notice I have taken certain liberties with Korean naming conventions. Some may also know that Koreans measure their ages differently than we do here in the West; but I have transmuted those measurements into the Western standard so as not to confuse English-speaking readers.

      Epigraph

      “When you look into a Korean woman’s eyes/ you want to stare/ at something far back/ dark,/ older even than the whole, sad peninsula.”

      — Tom Crawford, from the poem “Stones,” published in The Temple on Monday

      “A man’s sexual aim … is to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature that is the opposite of these; to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.”

      — Kingsley Amis, from One Fat Englishman

      Part 1

      Same Same, but Different

      Chapter 1

      On an afternoon in August, Meiko lay on her mat straining to hear the sound of girls being raped all around her — and when she couldn’t, convinced herself that she had finally died.

      Meiko had been waiting to die for months now, for death to burst through the thin rug that covered her stall door and rescue her with the chivalry of an older brother. Death, she imagined, would not enter this cubicle like the soldiers did, day after day. Death would be tender. It would lift her softly into the air, float her like a piece of chaff on the wind, out and over the camp, above the burning hillsides of Manchuguo, and carry her away, as if on a river, to a place of incomparable silence.

      But now, soundlessness had betrayed her. At this point in the day, the camp should have been full of the noise that she had come to refer to as The Arguments. That’s what the soldiers’ visits to the girls on the left and right of her always sounded like. Listening to them through the plywood walls of her cubicle, Meiko likened it to fierce arguing between a man and a woman. The Arguments would begin with harsh words from both parties, each trying to convince the other of something through shouting. But soon the man’s voice would win over, growing louder and more intense. The girl’s voice would try for a while to match that ferocity, to fight against whatever position the man was taking. But soon his grunts and his bellows drowned her out, growing impossibly loud in the small cubicle, crashing against its thin walls with the bluntness of a mallet. Soon Meiko could barely hear the girl’s voice at all — just a whiff of pleading lost under the soldier’s screams of aimless defiance. His hollers would build to some inevitable crescendo, rising and rising, and then at last peak with pride, a scream of triumphant conquest. And then, just as soon as it began, the noise would grind back down again, like a motor cut off. Next came silence that wasn’t quite silent. Just the sound, barely audible, of the girl weeping to herself in shame, having lost yet another Argument. Scant moments to wallow in that disgrace before the gruff flap of her curtain, another soldier entering, another Argument beginning as the last one had.

      Meiko sat up on her tatami mat. Oh, she was not dead. She could hear that familiar symphony inside her body, the wail of infection that started in her swollen genitals and burned all the way up to her sinuses. Thirsty, she reached for the jug of water sitting on the low table next to her mat, tucked its spout beneath her split lip. A mere tickle of water fell into her throat. Meiko cradled the empty vessel and stared blandly past the table to the paper box on the floor beyond it, wilted by the August heat and brimming with unopened condoms. She could see their familiar brand name gleaming in Japanese on the tinfoil — Assault No. 1. Next to the box was a ceramic dish the size of a shaving bowl full of cloudy grey water: the disinfectant that the soldiers were suppose to use after they had put on the Assault. But it had been months since the men had bothered with condoms or cleanser, and months since she had the strength to insist. Another box sat next to it, partially hidden under a blanket. It was stuffed with Gyumpo bills, the Japanese military currency, wrinkled and adorned with pictures of violent birds. Her tips from the more guilt-ridden soldiers.

      Meiko couldn’t handle the quiet any longer. She forced herself to her feet with one awkward thrust, and was nearly sucked back down by the rip tide of her fever. She picked up a faded orange shirt off her floor and put it on, pulling it down as far as it would go, to the middle of her bare thighs, which had scars and cigarette burns on them. One step and she was at her curtain; a second and she was outside of it, standing in the wooden hallway. Up one end and down the other, curtain after tattered curtain hung over cubicles exactly like hers. She spotted one of them rustle suddenly, down at the far end. A face peeped out, belonging to a girl named Hiromi. She stared at Meiko in terrified confusion. Meiko placed a finger to her split lip to keep the child silent. When she did, the girl vanished back behind her curtain, leaving Meiko to face whatever punishment awaited her for being in the hallway.

      And that punishment could come at any moment, now that she was drifting up the mud-caked planks toward the common room. It would come as a scream from the camp manager. Or a soldier rushing over, followed by the quick flare of pain as the butt of a rifle cracked her in the jaw. But Meiko staggered into the common room to find it empty. Empty. In the months since the Japanese had moved them here from the last camp, she had never seen this room without people in it. The manager’s podium stood like an abandoned sentry guarding the hallway. Resting behind its tall lip was the metal box of red tickets that the manager gave the soldiers after they coughed up their Gyumpo for the privilege of going into the hall and choosing a cubicle. Meiko moved deeper into the wide common room. On the dining tables in the middle, she found plates caked with half-finished rice balls, limp miso noodles, and jaundiced bits of cooked radish — remnants of a meal interrupted. She strolled over, brazen as a newcomer, and helped herself to the food, stuffing the stale, soggy chunks into her mouth with thrusts of her hand.

      And that’s when the unnatural heat of the room hit her. Despite the August temperatures, someone had lit the camp’s charcoal furnace on the far side of the room for the first time since late spring; she looked over to see a shimmer of orange pulsing out of its iron cage. Meiko weaved over on unsteady legs to take a closer look, the heat intensifying the nearer she got. She stooped and looked through the grate, then grabbed the wrought-iron handle and pulled the door open. The thick cardboard-covered books had been stuffed in there haphazardly and were now curdling under the flames’ snap and spittle. The ledgers. The manager’s ledgers. The camp’s history, the transactions that occurred and what the girls were owed, were vanishing into smoke.

      A noise wafted over her then from the front entry beyond the stove. No mistaking it: the grind and rumble of army trucks. Meiko shuffled toward the opened doors. One stiff step after another and she was through the threshold and descending the stone blocks that led to the muddied ground. There in the courtyard, she waited for her eyes to adjust to the August sunshine. When they did, she saw dozens of Japanese soldiers, the anonymous faces that had visited her over and over in her stall, piling into army trucks at a pace that left her baffled. These men were not hopping into the back or onto the rails with the haste of warriors going into battle. They were instead climbing into the trucks languidly, their faces sunken and bodies limp with sadness. When each truck was full, it pulled away from the camp with no urgency beneath its wheels and joined the slow line of other trucks heading toward the Manchurian hills on the horizon. Men drifted past her with their packs and their helmets, but no one paid her any attention. It was like she had finally become the ghost that she had longed to be.