Everyone Became a Demon

on my mother's theory of evil

Photo by nulo

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Tominaga Shozo, one of the army officers in the Japanese Imperial Army and a war criminal for his actions in the Rape of Nanking and other brutalities, wrote: “We made them like this. Good sons, good daddies, good elder brothers at home were brought to the front to kill each other. Human beings turned into murdering demons. Everyone became a demon within three months.”

Three months is so short a time frame—it’s about as long as Sea Monkeys live. It is so easy, I think, to become a demon.

My mother’s belief system includes a fundamental belief that some people are inherently good and some people are inherently bad; she even believes that she can tell by looking at someone’s face if they’re a “decent” person. However, there’s a loophole: people who have done terrible things, accordingly, can be inherently good. How? Because things like alcohol can turn good people into demons.

I didn’t learn about her position on booze until a few years back, when I’d just begun my early forties. I did know, growing up, that she was twitchy when it came to the stuff. She didn’t drink at all, and she didn’t want my father to drink, though he drank plenty regardless, and she was always sensitive to how much I drank at mealtime once I was in my 20s, which I found annoying. If I had more than one glass of wine, she’d want me to end it there. A second glass of wine made her edgy. She’d give me significant looks, or she’d say outright, “Aiya, stop drinking. Too much alcohol.”

I grew up believing that my father had a drinking problem because my mother always said that he had a drinking problem. I’m not sure that he’d be categorized as an alcoholic by the DSM-V, but I’d witnessed frightening behavior by him when he’d had too much to drink, and there was a bottle of wine on his side of the bed for as long as I was alive to notice it. Anything nasty he did throughout their marriage (a marriage that is still ongoing) was, according to my mother, due to alcohol. When I told my mother about this thing or that thing that he’d done to me, she’d ask, “Was he drinking?” Inevitably, he was.