were for the noncommissioned officers; and the nights were for officers. Everyone was on a strict schedule so that they would never cross paths and interfere with someone of a higher rank. The enlisted boys did not stay long — they would enter your stall with a quick little snap of your curtain, climb aboard you and pump away until they let out that little scream of triumph, perhaps urged on by the yells of hayaku! hayaku! from the hallway. The officers were, by contrast, far worse. They were allowed to stay longer, sometimes all night, and asked for the most awful, humiliating things.
Another rule was that you were not to speak Korean at any time. This meant the girls ate in silence at meals, huddled over their plates of bland rice balls and miso soup, silent because most of them couldn’t speak Japanese, couldn’t even speak enough Japanese to find out if the girl sitting next to her spoke Japanese. What a clever way to keep us from conspiring, Meiko thought. Of course, some girls forgot or couldn’t help themselves, blurting out a brief Korean phrase while at the table or lugging boxes of supplies to the trucks lined up in the courtyard. It enraged the soldiers to hear Korean because most of them didn’t understand a word of it and assumed that the girls were planning an escape. Speaking a single Korean sentence could result in a ten-minute beating.
One afternoon a couple of weeks after her arrival, Meiko was at the lunch table admiring a ferocious little bruise that an officer had left on her ankle, when one of the older girls came over and said in fluent Japanese: “They will lose interest in you soon enough, you know.”
Meiko gaped at the girl who had spoken at her. She looked about twenty years old, but it was hard to tell: her hair was matted against her head and her eyes had gone yellow from some form of disease.
“The officers, I mean,” the girl went on. “They’ve a taste for the virgins — or at least the virginal. You have that look for now, but don’t worry — you’ll lose it eventually.” She half smiled then, revealing a mouth full of missing teeth. “Before long you’ll start to look like me and they’ll leave you alone. Leave you for the common soldiers.”
Meiko said nothing.
The girl glanced down then at the bruise on Meiko’s ankle, and above it at the weeping blister across her shin where the first officer had burned her with the poker. “The other girls have been murmuring about you,” she said. “Did you really bite a corporal on the penis your first night here?”
Meiko nodded solemnly.
The girl looked like she wanted to chuckle, but held it in. “You shouldn’t resist them so much. They’ll kill you if they think you’re too difficult to handle. If you want to live, then you should follow the rules and accept what they want from you. If you want to live, then just do what needs to be done. Make sure they wear the sack, make sure you clean yourself, give your tickets to the manager on time, and don’t make a fuss — about anything. If you want to live, be a ghost. Be anonymous.”
Meiko licked her lips. “Do I want to live? Should I want to live?”
The girl did chuckle then. “My name is Natsuki,” she said. “That’s not my real name, of course. What’s yours? What’s your not-real name?”
“Meiko.”
Natsuki placed a hand on the back of Meiko’s neck and leaned in close. Whispered low, so the house wouldn’t hear. “You bit a corporal on the penis, Meiko. Trust me — you want to live.”
Natsuki proved to be an expert at anonymity, at being the sweet silent flesh that the men expected to find on the other side of a stall curtain. Her background was similar to Meiko’s: she had attended a private school for girls in Pyongyang before being taken away, and she was fluent in Japanese. She took it upon herself to teach Meiko how to be just another nameless spectre living in the house, as opposed to a girl with a reputation for defiance. “I consider it my obligation, as your unni,” she said. So strange, Meiko thought, to hear Natsuki speak even a single word of Korean. Unni: an older sister, but here meant as a female friend who is older than you are. “Firstly, you cannot blame the soldiers for their tantrums. They see all this as a simple transaction. They give money to the manager, the manager gives them their ticket, they give the ticket to you, you give them service. Refuse to service them, or refuse to service them in the way they wish, and they feel cheated and perfectly within their right to go berserk on you. So don’t refuse them.” Be pliant, she said. Eat quietly. Don’t ask questions. Don’t breathe loudly. Don’t even let them see you go to the bathroom. Achieving anonymity made respecting your own role easier. That meant collecting your tickets and guarding them against thievery, and making sure that the house manager accurately recorded your day’s take in the big ledgers. Meiko noticed that Natsuki always pushed her way to the front of the line to have her tickets counted, standing over the podium and staring at the manager’s hand to make sure he wrote the numbers down correctly. “The ledgers are everything,” Natsuki told her. “It’s how we and our families will be paid when this ordeal is over. Endure whatever the soldiers want of you, Meiko — no matter how disgusting or violent — but make sure you’re paid. If the house sees these acts as nothing more than simple transactions, then treat them as such. But make sure you’re paid.”
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