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That was the winter when we fought the worm people, the winter when we drove them from Shanghai and up the Yangtze valley, the winter we surrounded and routed them at their capital and drove their armies into dispersed retreat. That was the winter when we showed the world that we, too, were a great and proud people. That was the winter of our glory. It was the winter of 1937.

Back then Nakamura Kenji was not the man he would later become, the man whose word could make corporate empires rise and fall, the man whose face would repeatedly cover business magazines. No, Nakamura Kenji was a raw sub-lieutenant, just out of the training college and at the head of his first command...

I remember the night before the fall of the city, when the worm army was already in full retreat and burning houses and farms as it fled. Sergeant Watanabe Kiyoshi – he was later killed fighting in Burma – was my second in command. When I think of him now, I have no memory of what he looked like, but I remember his eyes. They were not a human being’s eyes. They were the eyes of a tiger, the eyes of a wolf.

"You must learn to kill, Nakamura-san," Watanabe had told me that night, with the glow of fires reddening the sky. The fires shone in his eyes, so that he looked like a demon. "You must learn the art of killing." It was far too direct a speech for a senior sergeant to make to a sub-lieutenant, but Kiyoshi was a veteran of the Shanghai battles, and I was a mere newcomer, too intimidated by my own men to even give them effective orders. The commands I gave sounded like requests, even to my own ears.

"I have killed," said I, remembering the Chinese soldier in his faded blue uniform I had seen through the scopes of a sniper rifle, and how his head had jerked backwards and his gun dropped from his hand when I squeezed the trigger. Had it been only that morning? "I know how to kill," I repeated.

"That sort of killing!" Watanabe had shaken his head, and someone among the troops chuckled. "If you permit me to say this, Nakamura-san, that sort of killing isn’t real killing. Real killing’s not at the other end of a sniper scope. Real killing," and he licked his lips, I remember this very well, "real killing is where you see the fear in your enemy’s eyes before you skewer him with your bayonet or," he glanced at my katana, "chop him in half with that."

I had watched a column of light tanks clank and clatter past so I didn’t have to look at him. "I don’t know if I can kill like that," I said. "I doubt if I’d want to. In any case, the sort of war we’re fighting doesn’t give much opportunity for sword-play, does it?"

"Oh, you’d be surprised, Nakamura-san," Watanabe had boomed. "Once you get used to killing, you’ll be amazed at how easy it is."

The next evening we were in Nanjing. The gate to the enemy capital had fallen that afternoon and the remaining Chinese soldiers were retreating across the Yangtze but some had remained and were mixing in with the worm civilians. It was chaos everywhere.

"Orders," the Colonel’s aide told me, when I went to meet him, leaving Watanabe in charge of my men. "Those are the orders, from Prince Asaka himself." And by the time I came back, it had already begun.

"Killing is more than fun," Nakamura-san," Watanabe had told me the other night. "Killing is a duty." And so the major had informed me.

I found that my men had not waited for orders – it had begun already, the heaps of corpses were already piling up. I didn’t interfere – I was ordered not to interfere – and, yes, I watched, and I learned. Yes, slowly, I began to learn.

Human life is not sacred, this I knew. Human life, even my own, is as nothing. So of what value is the life of a mere worm? My life is forfeit to the Emperor, this I have been told since the moment I joined the military; and if my life is not mine, of what value are these lives?

And I watched, and I learned, yes, I learned.

One day I killed my first Chinese with the katana. He was one of the soldiers who had hidden in the Safe Zone, and we had found him and dragged him out. He was a sturdy man, no longer young, with deep lines alongside his mouth and nose. His arms were bound behind his back and he was hobbled as well.

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