The Enemy — Class 12 MCQs with Answers

Key concepts: The Enemy (Class 12 English)

Pearl S. Buck's wartime story of Dr Sadao Hoki, a Japanese surgeon who finds a wounded American prisoner of war washed up below his house. Torn between the surgeon's training and the patriot's duty, he operates, loses his servants, is offered assassins by the General — and finally lets the man escape.

Dr Sadao Hoki

A famous surgeon and scientist, sent to America at twenty-two and returned at thirty. He is kept in Japan because he is perfecting a discovery to render wounds entirely clean, and because the old General may need an operation.

Hana

Met at Professor Harley's house in America. Sadao 'waited to fall in love with her until he was sure she was Japanese', since his father would never have received her otherwise; the marriage was arranged in the old Japanese way.

The man on the beach

Flung from the sea, with a reopened gun wound on the right side of his lower back, the flesh blackened with powder. Sadao packs it with sea moss; the cap reads 'U.S. Navy'.

The impossible choice

'If we sheltered a white man in our house we should be arrested and if we turned him over as a prisoner, he would certainly die.' Both agree the best thing is to put him back in the sea — and neither moves.

Why he cannot refuse

'if the man were whole I could turn him over to the police without difficulty. I care nothing for him. He is my enemy… But since he is wounded…' The surgeon overrules the patriot.

Hana washes him

Yumi refuses — 'I have never washed a white man, and I will not wash so dirty a one now' — so Hana does it herself, in anger at that stubbornness.

The professor's rule

'Ignorance of the human body is the surgeon's cardinal sin, sirs!' Mid-operation Sadao calls the man 'My friend', as he calls all his patients, 'forgetting that this was his enemy'.

The servants

The gardener says the sea and the gun will take revenge; Yumi fears for the children if their father is condemned a traitor; the servants believe America has made the couple forget their own country. On the seventh day they leave together.

The unfinished report

Sadao types one sentence of a letter to the Chief of police — 'On the twenty-first day of February an escaped prisoner was washed up on the shore in front of my house' — and locks it in a secret drawer.

The General

He will not let Sadao be arrested, since no other surgeon can be trusted: 'Suppose you were condemned to death and the next day I had to have my operation?' He wishes one could combine 'the German ruthlessness with the American sentimentality'.

The assassins

The General offers two of his private assassins, who 'know the trick of inward bleeding'. They never come — because, suffering, he 'thought of nothing but myself. In short, I forgot my promise'.

The escape

Sadao gives Tom his boat, food, water, quilts and his own flashlight, with a signalling code, and directs him to an unfortified island submerged only in storms. Seeing no light there, Sadao knows he is safe, and wonders: 'I wonder why I could not kill him?'