Summary
Dr. Sadao’s house is built on the Japanese coast where he used to play as a boy. He would visit there with his father, his father telling him that the islands there were “stepping stones” to Japan’s future. Sadao’s father was not warm and did not play with him, concerned only with his son becoming educated. Sadao was sent to America at twenty-two to study medicine. He became a famed surgeon and scientist and was working on a way to keep wounds entirely clean. He returned home by thirty. When the war with America began, he was kept from fighting because he treated the General, who had a condition and perhaps needed an operation.
One day, Sadao comes out of his home and watches the mist creeping through the pines. In the distance, a small island reveals itself. His wife, Hana, comes out and joins him. The two of them met in America by chance at the home of a professor who wanted to do something “convivial” for his foreign students. Sadao would not pursue her until he was sure she was Japanese, but when this was clear, the two of them embarked on a pleasant courtship that resulted in marriage when they finished their work and came home to Japan. They had two young children and were very happy.
Standing and looking out over the water, the two of them suddenly espy something coming out of the mists. It is a man, staggering as if in pain. Hana cries out in surprise. The man is hidden again, then revealed crawling on his hands and knees. No one else is near; the beach is empty and quiet.
Sadao can tell he is wounded, and at the same moment, he and his wife realize the man is white. The man collapses, unconscious. His hair is blonde and his face is dirty and haggard. He has a gunshot wound that has been opened by the rocks; the flesh is blackened with powder.
Sadao murmurs aloud that he does not know what to do with the man, but his training kicks in and he tries to stanch the bleeding. He thinks it would be best to put him back in the water and Hana agrees, but neither moves to do so. Sadao says it would be folly to keep a white man in their home, but if he were turned over as a prisoner, he would die. Sadao thinks he looks American, and he picks up the cap. It says "U.S. Navy," and he and Hana know he is a prisoner of war, escaped.
Sadao sighs that if the man were not wounded, he could turn him over immediately. He cares nothing for the man, who is his enemy, and he also appears quite common in mien. However, he is wounded and must be taken into the house. Hana frets about the servants but decides they will tell them that the man will be given over to the police eventually.
The two pick up the emaciated man and manage to carry him inside. They place him in the empty bedroom which was once Sadao's father’s. It is filled with only Japanese décor, as his father wanted. Hana procures a quilt but sees how dirty the man is. She does not want to touch him, so she decides that Yumi, the child’s nurse, can help. When Sadao touches the man’s pulse and heartbeat, Hana admonishes him not to try to save the man. Sadao replies that he needs an operation or he will die, but he may die anyway. He stares at the man and says he must have incredible vitality even to be alive right now.
Sadao leaves, saying that the man must at least be washed. Hana does not want to be alone with the white man; he is the first she’s seen since she left America and he seems different from those people. She goes to the room where Yumi is playing with the three-month-old baby boy and calls her out.
Sadao is briefing the servants, who are very disconcerted. The old gardener says the white man ought to die because both the gun and the sea tried to make it so and they should not intervene in what is meant to be. Hana is not superstitious but wonders if it is ever okay to help an enemy. She takes Yumi into the room where the white man lies.
Yumi refuses to wash him; she is so stubborn and her face is so fierce that Hana is afraid—what if the servants say something to the authorities? Hana tells her that she understands, but she insists that Yumi must know they are going to turn him in. Yumi says this is not her business. Hana gently sends her back to work and decides to wash the man herself. She works efficiently, her anger ebbing but her anxiety rising as she waits for Sadao.
When Sadao enters, he has his surgeon’s bag. She cries out that he has decided to operate and he nods. He tells her to fetch towels. The man’s bleeding ruins the mat under him, to Hana’s distress, but Sadao does not seem to notice or care. Sadao and Hana turn the man over and wash his back. Sadao is in his focused state of mind, his “absorption when he [is] at work,” and Hana “wondered for a moment if it mattered to him what was the body upon which he worked so long as it was for the work he did so excellently.”
Sadao tells his wife she will have to apply the anesthetic. She has never done this before and is afraid. He begins coolly looking at the body, noting the bullet is still in there and the man has lost much blood. Hana feels nauseous and Sadao tells her he cannot stop now or the man will surely die. She goes outside to vomit, and he thinks that this is okay because she should have an empty stomach.
Sadao thinks there is no reason why this man should live, but this makes him steelier and he moves swiftly and efficiently. The man groans. When Hana returns, he tells her how to administer the anesthetic. She sees the man suffering and wonders about the stories of the prisoner-of-war camps. They were rumors, flickers, she muses. She is unsure but hopes the man has not been tortured. There are scars, though, on his neck. She looks at Sadao and mentions the scars, but he does not answer.
Sadao has no thoughts, only pleasure as he probes near the kidney. He is in his element and knows every part of the human body. He murmurs to the patient, as is his habit, speaking of the bullet not being quite near the kidney as he’d thought. Suddenly, the bullet is out and the man quivers and says a few words in English—“Guts…They got…my guts…” He sinks into a profound stupor. Sadao hates him but feels the pulse. He thinks he does not want the man to live, but he gives him pain medicine and says the man will indeed live.
Analysis
Critics are prone to dismiss Pearl S. Buck’s work in light of more complex, modernist literary offerings in the same era, but readers would be remiss to ignore her. Paul A Doyle has a typically mixed perspective on Buck: “As a consequence of her literary antecedents, Mrs. Buck does not use intriguing interplay of memories, subtleties, or the more internal probings which are so much the fashion in the modern short story. Where many of the more recent masters of the short narrative are in-direct, Mrs. Buck is direct; where they are subtle and rather muted, she is obvious; where their style is often rich in poetic emanations and connotations, her style is concise and simply utilitarian. Anyone familiar with the work of the more advanced short story writers will miss in Mrs. Buck's narratives the tonal intentions, the emphasis on mood, atmosphere, and mental reflection, the frequent prose-poetry, wistful and pensive, and blending of theme, mood, and words, found in the best work of the moderns. In most of Mrs. Buck's short fiction we search futilely for delicate nuances of style and technique.” Thus, a short but rich story, “The Enemy” offers much for the reader to contemplate. We meet Dr. Sadao Hoki, an eminently professional and erudite Japanese man, on the shore of the beach near the site of many of his childhood memories with his equally stoic father. Sadao and his wife, Hana, studied in America, and while it is clear they made gains in their careers (especially Sadao), they do not seem to look back on their time in that country with any great affection or nostalgia. The Americans are now officially the enemy, as World War II has begun, and it is that reality, combined with the bitter memories of prejudicial treatment in the country, that colors Sadao and Hana’s response to seeing the wounded American man wash up at their feet.
Buck beautifully chronicles the tension between Sadao’s ethical commitment to his profession (as represented by the Hippocratic Oath) and his loathing for the man. The Oath states that “I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings”; against his will, Sadao is reminded of that (even though the narrator does not specifically reference the oath). Sadao sees that the man is white but still probes the wound to ascertain what is going on inside him. His “trained hands seemed of their own will to be doing what they could to stanch the fearful bleeding.” Even as he and Hana wonder if they should toss him back in the sea rather than risk the danger of having him in their home, he muses that since the man is wounded, he cannot do so; this is the crucial distinction: the man needs a doctor’s aid. Once brought into the home, Sadao sees the extent of his injuries even more; when Hana asks, “What if he should live?”, Sadao replies, “What if he should die?” This would be against his understanding of his profession’s duty: if he could try to save a life, he must do so.
Once Sadao decides to operate, Buck implies just how entrenched the doctor’s training is and how little it matters that the man is ostensibly his “enemy.” When Hana rues that the mat is ruined, Sadao responds “as though he did not care.” He “did not seem to hear her,” but she was “used to his absorption when he was at work.” When he probes for the bullet, he does so “with cool interest.” When he considers that the man’s wounds are grave and he might die, he considers it a personal challenge to help him live. Striking the bullet with his instrument, Sadao “felt only the purest pleasure” and even began murmuring to the patient as he oft did, calling him, ironically, “My friend.” His movements are efficient and efficacious, and the reader is supposed to marvel at his skill.
Throughout this surgery, though, the sense of the danger this man’s presence puts the couple through remains conspicuous. It is indeed a risk to have the white man here, especially as he is an escaped prisoner of war, and even though Sadao seems to find comfort in the routine of his profession, his concern about what he is doing does not leave him. While the servants are depicted as stubborn and rather facile, their concerns still have merit. Hana is annoyed with them but also “felt unreasonably afraid.”
Hana is potentially a stand-in for the reader. Even more than Sadao, she vacillates between fear and compassion, lack of surety and conviction. She is perturbed by the white man’s body and does not want to wash him, but she thinks about how his skin, “though rough with exposure, was of a fine texture and must have been very blond when he was a child. While she was thinking these thoughts not really liking the man better now that he was no longer a child, she kept washing hum until his upper body was quite clean.” She is anxious, concerned about the man’s blood ruining her mat, and a skillful assistant to Sadao—all at the same time. Though she is not a physician, she seems to have the same instinctive need to offer succor and compassion in her own way. And perhaps most importantly of all, she allows herself a flicker of doubt regarding her own county’s cruel treatment of prisoners of war. There are rumors, she knows, but “sometimes she remembered such men as General Takima, who at home beat his wife cruelly, though no one mentioned it now that he had fought so victorious a battle in Manchuria. If a man like that could be so cruel to a woman in his power, would he not be cruel to one like this for instance?”
