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All that morning I had watched my fellow officers behead worms with their swords. Chinese prisoners, some hundred of them, had been lined up before a dry ditch. One by one they had been made to kneel and then their heads were chopped off. It was sword practice.

Sakamoto, my colleague from the training college, had already dispatched six or seven in this way. It seemed easy when he did it, the head toppling while the body still knelt. The Chinese were remarkably silent, and not one of them tried to resist or run away, not that it would have done them any good. I stayed back until Captain Hondo’s eyes fell on me. He had been directing the practice.

"You, Nakamura. Wash your sword with that one’s blood!"

The Chinese looked at me just once, as I approached. I don’t know what he saw in my eyes and I no longer remember what I saw in his; but I remember his neck bared for my stroke, and how I raised my arms and brought them down in a short arc, and the sudden thudding resistance of the neck, and then the Chinese was toppling.

"Easy, wasn’t it?" Hondo grinned. "You’ll learn, boy."

Yes, I learned. In those weeks, a lot I learned. Each time my katana was washed with blood, I learned, and in other ways, besides.

I learned several minor truths, and I learned one Great Truth, one that has stood me in good stead since that day.

In the screams of prisoners being used for bayonet practice, I learned that killing is easy, and gets easier the more one does of it. Standing before the violated corpse of a young mother, who had begged for her life and at last tried to buy it with a ring, I learned, too, that looting and rape are pleasant and good for morale, and that there are fewer more pleasant things than inflicting fear when one can inflict fear. I learned that a human is no more than a goat or a chicken, and that a man can die as easily and meaninglessly as a fowl can, and that life is as meaningless as death, and equally to be scorned. Yes, I learned that as well. But those were minor truths, as one might think for oneself.

There was the Great Truth, though: the Truth that says that nothing really matters anymore; when the tide of blood is loosed on the world, life and death having ceased to have meaning, then there is no meaning to the world, and, therefore, anything and everything is justified to get one’s goals. There is no right or wrong, and this is the Greatest Truth of all.

It has stood me in good stead since that day.

One afternoon I stood in front of a blazing building and watched burning scraps of paper rain down all around me. Idly, I picked up a piece of that paper. The unburned part was thin and yellowed, obviously of great age. Perhaps that building had been a library, I had thought, and pitched a hand grenade into the fire. And this from me, Nakamura Kenji, who had once loved reading delicate poetry!

You understand how much I had learned.

Rape was so casual that I stopped thinking about it; what the worms did to each other was so far beneath my human level of comprehension that what we did to them was without importance. Does it matter to the man who stamps the life of a cockroach out whether the cockroach has dreams? I have only vague memories; women tied to chairs and raped, women killed and then raped, women raped and then killed, women raped to death. How did it matter? They were worms.

One day in the late winter I stood beside the Yangtze, downstream, and watched the river bring the corpses in. They stacked up like driftwood, and the smell of them was scarcely tolerable even from far up from the bank. I remember seeing the corpse of a woman, breasts enormously distended, with a rotting baby still clutched in the crook of one arm, come floating in. The soldiers with me fired at the breasts of the dead woman and popped them like balloons, and I laughed even as they laughed. It was funny.

That evening, I remember, we had received some new reinforcements, straight out of training, and they were looking at me with faces full of fear. I had no idea why – after all, I was their officer, and there was no reason why they should fear me. Tomorrow, in any case, Sergeant Watanabe Kiyoshi and I would teach them the finer points of using the bayonet, and they needed the toughening-up. But I remember that night, when I went into my quarters and looked into the mirror, I could scarcely recognise my eyes. They were a killer’s eyes, those of a soulless murderer. I was happy; I was gratified. At last, I thought, I am fit to be a warrior for the Emperor. At last, I truly belong.

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