How It All Goes Down
The Body on the Mountain
- Back in Japan, a man from the Ministry of Home Affairs knocks on a door and interrogates the family inside—a farmer, his wife, and their live-in laborer—about Mutsuhiro Watanabe.
- He has no idea that the laborer he is talking to is Mutushiro Watanabe.
- Watanabe is living under an alias (Jennifer Garner) and has grown a moustache to avoid detection.
- He's having trouble sleeping, but more because he's being pursued than because he actually feels remorse.
- One day he tells the farmer who he really is and the farmer advises him to keep his mouth shut.
- Meanwhile other men, like S***head and the Quack (if you need a good name for your punk band, there you go), are being tried for war crimes.
- Even Jimmie Sasaki is sentenced to six years' hard labor.
- The next summer, Watanabe helps the father's son sell leather straps around the countryside. (Did he put "beat American POWs with a belt" on his resume under relevant experience?)
- He manages to sneak away and visit his family.
- Detectives arrive while he's there, and he hides in the closet.
- Leather strap sales fail (they just don't beat people like they did during the war), so the farmer's son opens a coffee shop and makes Watanabe his waiter.
- A woman falls in love with him, but he doesn't want to marry her, seeing himself as "a burden which would make her unhappy" (5.36.33).
- In 1946, two bodies are found at the base of a mountain. The woman isn't identified, but the man is Mutsuhiro Watanabe. He killed himself.