Free The Investigation by Jung-myung Lee Page A

accept my terms.’
    ‘What terms? I’m only a guard. If you want to negotiate, do it with the head guard or the warden.’
    ‘No. They just want to kill me. You – you’re interested in the stories. About me. About the prison.’
    ‘I don’t have the power to let you live.’
    ‘I don’t expect that. Just write down what I tell you. Don’t remove a single word and don’t add anything. Of course, you may not believe me. You might think I’m
pulling your leg. But you can’t edit it. You have to record what I say, word for word.’
    ‘And why would I do that?’
    ‘Somebody needs to record what is going on in here. So people will know what happened, when the war ends.’
    ‘The regulations are to destroy documents after a certain time. No record exists forever.’
    Prisoner 331 threw me a confident smile and pointed at my head. ‘At least what’s recorded in there won’t disappear. The walls of this terrible place will crumble and documents
will burn, but the memories in your head will remain. So don’t you die until the war’s over!’ His eyes flashed.
    I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know what he wanted out of this. I doubted he’d tell me the truth. Even if he did, I was sure it would be bait for some scheme.
    ‘Seven years,’ he blurted out, disregarding my confusion. ‘It’s been almost seven years since I came to this hellhole.’
    I picked up my pencil. The recycled paper waited hungrily to record his story.
    ‘From the day I got here I dreamed of escaping,’ he said. ‘I dug the tunnel to escape from death, but it turns out what I dug was the road to death.’

    Choi arrived at Fukuoka Prison in July 1938 for the attempted assassination of a prominent figure and the instigation of rebellion. He had spent half his life being hounded and
the other half in prison. As a teenager he was pursued by the police for setting fire to several public buildings. The year he turned twenty he crossed the Tumen River. Manchuria was an ideal place
for Koreans; they weren’t oppressed by the Japanese Government-General of Korea or the vicious Special Higher Police, and they weren’t subject to the violence of Japanese merchants. He
settled in a Korean neighbourhood in Mukden. He frequented gambling dens and bars, shouting and cursing. He honed his fighting skills. Soon he was earning bundles of cash from the barwoman who
pleaded with him to collect overdue bar tabs on her behalf, from the rice dealer who asked him to find the employee who’d stolen from him, and from the business magnate who tasked him with
killing his cheating wife’s lover.
    One day he was hanging around a gambling den when a man with small rat-like eyes approached him. Choi drank with the man for a couple of hours, then packed his bags and followed him out of town.
They walked for two days until they arrived at a cave in the mountains, where twenty bearded men in animal pelts were hiding, exhausted from anxiety and hunger. These men had lost everything to the
Japanese. Their rice paddies and houses had been expropriated; their food, belongings and wives had been taken through allocated collection; their home towns and language obliterated. They were
willing to do anything just to kill some Japs. The problem was that nobody had ever killed a single one. A man with a thick beard introduced himself as the commander of an autonomous anti-Japanese
guerrilla unit; in reality, they were merely a gang of thieves who swung their fists at Korean merchants under the guise of building a war chest. The commander was a drunk and welcomed Choi’s
fists and big ideas, thinking that they would help the unit grow into the most feared in Mukden, but he soon kicked himself for his stupidity – Choi was not an obedient dog, he was a wolf.
Choi became the leader of a subset gang that threatened the commander’s position. The commander, unable to wrest control, leaked false information to a Japanese spy: that a man named Choi
Chi-su