Tomokawa

Tomokawa is a former wartime associate of Tenji Nakamura whose recollections expose a stark divide between what Japanese perpetrators feared being punished for and what they could leave unspoken. In a conversation with the ailing Nakamura, he describes the fear of being prosecuted for mistreating Allied prisoners, then invokes violence against Chinese people in Manchukuo that he believes went unpunished. His matter-of-fact account makes him both a witness to wartime brutality and a voice for the self-serving logic that could make such brutality seem acceptable.

Identity and Introduction

Tomokawa appears late in the story, when Nakamura visits his home while ill. His wife is there, returning with food during their conversation. The novel supplies no fuller biography for Tomokawa, but his remarks establish that he experienced the war, participated in actions in Manchukuo, and was involved in the work of building the Death Railway. He speaks as someone who has survived the war without being brought to trial for the crimes he recalls.

His perspective emerges in a scene filtered through Nakamura’s failing, morphine-affected consciousness. As Tomokawa speaks, Nakamura sees him as a monstrous, fire-breathing figure; the image belongs to Nakamura’s perception, not to Tomokawa’s physical appearance. The distortion gives the exchange an unsettling doubleness: Tomokawa speaks conversationally, while Nakamura’s vision makes the violence within his words difficult to ignore.

War, the Railway, and Tomokawa’s Defense

Tomokawa recalls fearing that he might be identified as a war criminal. He presents that fear as a joke because, in his view, the authorities cared only about what Japanese forces had done to Allied prisoners. He then brings up the violence against Chinese people in Manchukuo, including abuse of women, and argues that it was not the basis on which Japanese personnel were hanged. His comparison does not amount to remorse or a repudiation of the violence. Instead, it redirects attention from the people harmed to the perceived inconsistency of the punishment.

He also minimizes the Allied prisoners’ experience, saying that they had it easy and should be proud of what they accomplished alongside their Japanese captors. To support his view of the railway, he stresses the speed and difficulty of its construction: it was completed in fifteen months, despite the English expectation that such a project would take five times as long. He remembers disease, starvation, Allied air raids, and the difficulty of making sick men work, but treats these as obstacles overcome in a feat of national effort. The contrast is telling: the same conditions that register as suffering in the account of the prisoners become evidence of achievement in Tomokawa’s account.

Responsibility and Selective Memory

Tomokawa’s discussion of prosecution draws attention to a gap between acknowledged conduct and public accountability. He says he feared being tried, but offers no indication that he himself faced a trial. His complaint is that Japanese crimes against Allied prisoners were punished while violence against Chinese people was not. The novel thus places his recollection beside the postwar record of proceedings against some Japanese personnel, including convictions for mistreatment of prisoners, and the unresolved scale and naming of the many Asian laborers who died building the railway. Those broader facts do not establish Tomokawa’s legal history; they sharpen the difference between the harm he admits and the selective boundaries of the justice he describes.

His account also illustrates how memory can preserve a perpetrator’s grievance more readily than a victim’s experience. He frames punishment as an unfair choice about which victims counted, but does not dwell on the people his own words implicate. The result is not a neutral explanation of unequal prosecution. It is a revealing instance of self-exoneration: Tomokawa recognizes the existence of violence, yet makes the injustice done to Japanese perpetrators the center of his argument.

Relationship with Nakamura and the Ending

Tomokawa speaks to Nakamura as an old associate, telling him that he had tried to reassure the Australian prisoner-painter’s wife that the painted man was not Nakamura, but that she never listened. He recalls the painter as an Australian who spent time with a sergeant who sang at night. The recollection offers a fragment of the prisoners’ lives, but Tomokawa turns it toward a claim that their singing meant conditions could not have been as bad as the stories suggested. The moment shows how a concrete memory can be made to serve a comforting conclusion.

Nakamura listens and finds an apparent common-sense wisdom in Tomokawa’s argument. That receptiveness matters: Tomokawa’s defense helps sustain the version of the past Nakamura has long used to understand his duty, even as Nakamura’s memories and sense of his own goodness begin to falter. Tomokawa ends the exchange by saying, "It was the happiest time of my life." The statement does not resolve the contradiction between companionship, achievement, and violence; it makes the contradiction sharper. For Tomokawa, the railway years can remain a source of happiness even when the conversation has exposed the human cost and the crimes his account leaves at its edges.