Mamiya and Boris Gromov

Lieutenant Mamiya and Boris Gromov are linked first as witnesses and perpetrators of wartime violence, then as uneasy collaborators and would-be executioner and target in a Siberian camp. Their relationship turns on Mamiya’s failed attempt to kill the man responsible for Yamamoto’s death: Boris spares him, but sends him home with a curse that Mamiya understands as the sentence of a life without love or belonging.

Wartime Origins

In 1938, Lieutenant Mamiya was assigned to escort Yamamoto on a clandestine mission across the Khalkha River. Mamiya’s official expertise was topography: he was expected to improve maps of the borderlands, whose uncertain boundaries and strategic importance made accurate military information valuable. He had little combat experience; his party also included Sergeant Hamano and Corporal Honda. The assignment belonged to a wider preparation for possible war with the Soviet Union, for which combat maps needed to show routes, campsites, water sources, and other practical details.

The expedition’s purpose and the surrounding political uncertainty eventually gave way to direct violence. Boris, then a Russian officer, ordered Mongolian soldiers to kill Yamamoto. Mamiya was thrown into a well and survived, but the experience left him with a profound loss of desire to live. He also knew that the mission had involved espionage in Mongolian territory, a secret that could place him in danger if exposed. The officer who had witnessed his presence now had his name and could connect him to the operation.

Recognition in the Camp

Nine years later, in the spring of 1947, Mamiya encountered Boris again in a Siberian coal-mining camp. Mamiya was working as an interpreter between Japanese prisoners and their Soviet captors. Boris, once an officer, was now dressed as a prisoner and assigned to labor at a station. Their mutual recognition was immediate: Boris could hardly have failed to remember the Japanese officer from the Khalkha River, and Mamiya recognized the man whose order had led to Yamamoto’s death.

Mamiya’s first fear was practical as well as personal. Boris now knew his name and could disclose his involvement in the earlier secret mission. A Soviet officer named Nikolai later identified the prisoner as Boris Gromov, formerly a major in the NKVD, and warned Mamiya to stay away from him. Nikolai described Boris’s former role organizing the Mongolian secret police and repressing suspected opponents. Despite his nominal imprisonment, Boris retained influence: he was treated with unusual deference and appeared to have protection from powerful connections.

Boris summoned Mamiya to the stationmaster’s office, where he waited without leg irons. He greeted him warmly, recalled their meeting nine years earlier, and asked how he had escaped from the well. He also noted that Mamiya had lost a hand and learned fluent Russian. Boris said he would not reveal Mamiya’s past, but made clear that he understood the exceptional circumstances of his survival. His friendly manner therefore carried a threat beneath it: he could expose Mamiya, yet chose for the moment to keep the secret between them.

A Bargain Built on Coercion

Boris offered Mamiya work as his assistant, presenting the offer as a way to improve conditions for Mamiya and his fellow Japanese prisoners. Mamiya would ordinarily have refused to collaborate, and he had no desire to secure his own safety at his comrades’ expense. Yet the offer also gave him a possible route toward Boris. He asked what the work would involve and accepted the position while concealing his intention to kill him.

The job placed Mamiya at the center of Boris’s illicit business. Boris diverted food, clothing, and medical supplies sent to the camp, stored and sold them, and arranged black-market shipments of coal by bribing railway workers and the stationmaster. He claimed the proceeds were intended to fund secret-police operations. Mamiya believed that much of the money was instead becoming Boris’s private fortune, including funds sent to foreign accounts and investments in gold. Boris entrusted him with managing these activities, even though Mamiya could have exposed them; in the camp’s closed system, however, censored mail, prohibited outside contact, and the complicity of those profiting from the scheme made disclosure difficult.

Over the following months, Mamiya became indispensable to Boris’s operation and managed its business side, while The Tartar handled violence. Boris increasingly controlled the camp and mine as a private domain. The prisoners’ worsening conditions were integral to that power: Boris assessed their labor capacity, reduced the rations of those he considered weak, and transferred food to stronger workers to increase production. As prisoners died, new groups arrived by train. Mamiya’s cooperation thus gave him proximity to Boris, but also made him an administrator within a system that treated human lives as replaceable labor.

The Failed Assassination

Mamiya’s aim remained to kill Boris. He understood that removing one man would not necessarily end the camp’s brutality, but believed Boris should not be allowed to continue living and wielding power. He waited for an opportunity that would give him confidence of success. Boris was cautious and kept The Tartar close, while Mamiya had only one hand and no weapon of his own. The prospect of returning Japanese prisoners of war offered a possible change in circumstances, but it did not itself resolve the danger or give Mamiya a clear opening.

When Mamiya finally confronted Boris with a pistol, Boris gave him the opportunity to shoot and required him to promise not to reveal his secrets if he missed. Mamiya loaded the weapon with difficulty and fired twice. Both shots missed, despite the second being deliberately aimed. Boris remained unharmed, recovered the pistol, and told Mamiya that he had never been capable of killing him. He framed the failure not as a matter of marksmanship but as proof that Mamiya was not qualified to take his life.

Boris then imposed a curse: Mamiya would never be happy, would neither love nor be loved, and would carry that condition back to his homeland. He insisted that he was not sparing Mamiya out of kindness, but because he killed only when he considered it necessary. The curse made the outcome more than a failed act of revenge. Mamiya had tried to give meaning to his survival by killing the man who had helped destroy his life; instead, Boris survived, retained control over the meaning of the encounter, and sent Mamiya away with a sentence that seemed to confirm his despair.

Separation and Lasting Burden

A week after the confrontation, Mamiya was transferred by train to Nakhodka and eventually returned to Japan. He never saw Boris again. Their relationship therefore ends without reconciliation, justice, or a second confrontation: Boris remains alive and powerful, while Mamiya leaves the camp physically separated from him but psychologically marked by the encounter.

In his account to Toru Okada, Mamiya describes himself as defeated and lost, and interprets the curse as a life in which he can neither love nor be loved. He calls himself a walking shell, yet telling the story gives him some degree of contentment before he disappears from the narrative. The relationship’s significance lies in this tension between survival and restoration. Mamiya escapes the camp and returns home, but neither his return nor his act of bearing witness undoes the earlier violence; the failed assassination instead joins the memory of Yamamoto’s death to Mamiya’s bleak understanding of his own life.