I’ll explain briefly what we are going to do. The experiment to be carried out on today’s prisoner is a simple one. It is a matter of investigating to what degree it is possible to cut away the lung in tuberculosis surgery. That is to say, the problem of how far one may cut a man’s lung without killing him is one of long duration in the treatment of tuberculosis and also has a bearing upon the practice of medicine in wartime. And so today, therefore, we intend to cut away complete one of this prisoner’s lungs and the upper section of the other. That is, to put it into a nutshell….”

While Arai’s pleasant voice was echoing form the walls of the operating room, the Old Man stood slightly bent, staring down at the water running across the floor. His slumped shoulders had a strange, painfully sad look about them. Only Chief Nurse Oba kept an expressionless face. She took some mercurochrome over to the operating table and began to paint the side of the prisoner. The liquid stained red his strong neck and chest and the breast covered with thick chestnut-colored hair. And further down, his white stomach, still untouched by the liquid, softly rose and fell. As Toda looked at that broad, white stomach, with the fine golden hair growing on it, he seemed for the first time to become aware that this was a white man, an American soldier taken prisoner by the Japanese.

‘The bastard’s sleeping peacefully, isn’t he?’ laughed one of the officers in the rear, perhaps with the intention of dissipating the gathering tension. ‘Little does he know he’ll be done for in half an hour.’

The words ‘done for’ reverberated hollowly inside Toda. The realization that this was an act of murder had not yet taken form in his mind. To strip a person of his clothes, lay him on an operating table, give him ether—all this he had done to patients countless times, from his students days up to the present…

Chief Nurse Oba and Ueda Nobu slowly descended to the dark basement in the squeaking hospital elevator.

`Say, this elevator makes an awful noise. It needs greasing, don't you think?' Ueda Nobu muttered, looking up at the metal ceiling of the elevator, from which the paint had almost entirely peeled off.

But the chief nurse, leaning against the wall with her eyes shut, didn't bother to respond. Nobu thought that the chief nurse's face was gaunter than usual and her cheekbones more prominent. Nobu hadn't had a chance to study the chief nurse's face so leisurely at close range before, and she was startled to notice how much grey was mixed with the black hair that had escaped the white cap.

`Why this one is really up in years.' With ill-disposed eyes, Nobu studied the other's profile. Years ago, before her marriage, when Nobu was registered at this hospital, Chief Nurse Oba had been four years ahead of her and no more than an ordinary nurse. Now, estranged from her companions and without anyone who could be called a friend, she strode about with her expressionless face, highly prized and made much of by all the doctors, but berated by the other nurses as `Miss Curry-favor' behind her back.

To wear a little lipstick and makeup as the other nurses did would be unthinkable for Chief Nurse Oba. Then, still more, it would be hard to imagine her dark face with its jutting bones bewitching the heart of any male patient.

`So now you're the chief nurse, eh?' Nobu whispered to herself, feeling a surge of envy and dislike for this woman who had become her superior.

When the elevator had reached the basement, Nobu grasped the handle of the trolley, which was between them, and pulled it out into the corridor. Naked light bulbs burned gloomily at forlorn intervals in the ceiling, which was lined with exposed pipes. Before the War, this section had been a place for shops and tearooms run by the hospital. Now the rooms were abandoned to the dust, used only as shelters during air raids. Since the morgue was at the far end of the corridor, Nobu began to push the trolley in that direction, but the chief nurse, who had been silent up to then, stopped her.

‘The other way, Mrs Ueda.'

‘But shouldn't it go there?’

‘The other way.' Her expressionless face hardening, the chief nurse shook her head.

‘But why, I wonder?’

‘It doesn't matter why. Do as I say.'

She wheeled the trolley with the white sheet over it down the corridor, filled with the odor of damp cement, towards the opposite end. While she pushed the trolley, Nobu studied the thin, stubborn back of the chief nurse, who was gripping the handles at the front of the trolley.

`She's like a stone, that's what she is. No human sympathy in her at all.'

At the very thought of the blank, stony face of this woman, Nobu felt a sudden shock at her breast as though from a collision. The light from the naked bulbs, leaving dark shadows, fell upon scattered bags of cement, broken laboratory tables, and various kinds of chairs with the stuffing protruding from them. The wheels of the trolley kept up their monotonous squeak.

`Chief?' Nobu intentionally said ‘Chief' instead of `Miss Oba.’ `Before, did anyone talk to you about today?'

But her companion did not glance back. She stubbornly gripped the handles and kept moving forward. Seeing this, Nobu let an ironic smile begin to form on her lips.

`Did Doctor Asai? Doctor Asai told me all about it. Quite unexpectedly, he turned up at my apartment. Was I surprised! He had been drinking saké. Afterwards he. . . .'

`That will do, Mrs. Ueda.' Chief Nurse Oba suddenly took her hands from the trolley handles. `Stop the trolley.'

`Here? Is this all right?'

The chief nurse said nothing.

`Is someone coming to take care of it?’

'Mrs. Ueda, the function of a nurse is to carry out what the doctors direct and keep her mouth shut.'

On the trolley between them, the sheet-covered corpse loomed white in the darkness. The two women stood for a moment glaring at each other with flashing eyes.

‘Then, too, Mrs. Ueda'—the chief nurse narrowed her eyes—why don't you just take the rest of the afternoon off and go home. And there should really be no need to say this, but don't speak about today to anyone. If by chance you should be loose mouthed about this...’

'If I'm loose mouthed, what'll happen then?’

'There'll be a great deal of trouble for Doctor Hashimoto. Can you understand that?’

'Is that right?' Nobu Ueda's mouth tightened. `So we nurses can be that important to doctors, eh?'

Then as though talking to herself, she whispered loud enough for the other to hear. `Unlike somebody else, I didn't take part today just because of Doctor Hashimoto.'

In that instant, before Nobu's eyes, pain shot through the chief nurse's face, as, her lips twisted and trembling, she tried to make some retort. From the time she had started at the hospital, Nobu had never seen the chief nurse show the least distress before a subordinate.

`Just as I thought!' Nobu's heart swelled with the joy of having at last struck the other's weak spot. `Isn't that something! This flinty woman is in love with Doctor Hashimoto.'

Without another word to Chief Nurse Oba, she turned and, ignoring the elevator, ran out through the recently built emergency exit into the garden.

Night had already swallowed up the garden. Before the War, when she had been a nursing student, when evening came lights would be burning in the windows of the Medical School buildings and of the hospital. To her they somehow resembled ships at anchor with all their flags flying and so recalled to Nobu the harbour festivals of neighboring Hakata, where she had once lived.

Now, however, the only lights were faint ones, those in the hospital reception room and the office. She heard the loud voices of men singing military songs. They came from the second floor conference room of First Surgery. That window, too, was covered with black curtaining, but some light flickered out through an opening.

`It's the officers who were there today,' Nobu thought. `They're really something aren't they. At a time when we've got nothing to eat but beans, they eat and drink as much as they want. I wonder what they're eating?'

Then Nobu remembered that after the vivisection was over, a fat little officer had put his mouth close to Dr. Asai's ear and whispered.

`Would you cut out the prisoner's liver for me?’ 'For what?'

As Dr. Asai's rimless glasses flashed, the fat little officer smiled sardonically. `The medical officers are going to have a little fun with the junior officers by having them try some of it.' And with that, Dr. Asai, too, seeing what sort of man the other was, smiled a thin sardonic smile of his own. When Nobu recalled this exchange, she shuddered with instinctive distaste. However, apart from this passing mood, it was all one to her whether the officers ate the prisoner's liver or didn't eat the prisoner's liver. As a nurse she had grown used to operations and the sight of blood, and today the fact that the man on the operating table was an American prisoner hadn't roused any particular apprehension in her. When Dr. Hashimoto cut in a straight line into the prisoner's skin, the only association of thought that this had provoked in Nobu was that of Hilda's white skin--the thought of the white hand of Hilda which had pounded the desk in the nurses' room as she fiercely scolded Nobu about the procaine injection for the patient with the spontaneous pneumothorax attack. And today, just as with Hilda's skin, faint golden hair had covered the prisoner's skin.

`Will Doctor Hashimoto say anything about today to Hilda, I wonder? He won't, I don't think.'

Nobu forcibly invoked within herself the sensation of having scored a joyous triumph over Hilda. `No matter how much of a blessed saint Mrs. Hilda is, she has no idea of what her own husband did today. But I know all about it.'

When she returned to her apartment, the room was completely dark. She sat down on the entrance step, suddenly overcome with weariness. She sat for some time, her shoes still on, her hands gripping her knees, staring down.

`Mrs. Ueda, I put half of your soap ration by the window. Later on give me the money please.' She heard the landlord's cold voice echo down the corridor and afterwards the slam of a door.

In the darkness of her room, the whiteness of bedding and dishes strewn about shone dimly. From a radio in the house next door a warning buzzer sounded with a tearing, metallic noise.

`What'll I do now?' It was always the same. Whenever Nobu returned from the hospital to this cold room, she felt herself overwhelmed by loneliness and isolation.

`Today as usual, work is over. All over. . . .'

Yes, today as usual work was over. What she was thinking of right now was no more than that. Since she had been away from the hospital for what had seemed to her to be a terribly long time, she felt especially weary, physically and mentally. Tomorrow again it would be a matter of checking the patients' blood pressure, their saliva and all that. Mrs. Hilda, all unknowing, might come to the hospital. That would be nice, she thought. And then she thought about Chief Nurse Oba.

`She's in love with Doctor Hashimoto. I'm the only one that knows that.'

She pulled off her shoes and threw them to one side and then turned on the light, which was shaded with a wrapping cloth. She turned on the gas and put on a pan of water containing beans. She faced the usual lonely, cheerless meal. And as she always did, she took from the closet the baby clothes which she had made for Masuo. These she spread upon her lap, and, not moving, she sat for a long time looking blankly down at them.

Endo, Shusaku. The Sea and Poison. Rutland, VT.: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1972 (first published in Japanese, 1958); 142-143; 159-165.