Page 15 of Daikon

SEVEN

THE CELL WAS FIVE SHORT paces long, the width slightly less than the span of her arms. A thin, lumpy futon, alive with lice, was rolled up in the corner.

It was to remain there, not to be used even as a cushion for sitting, between the blasts of the whistle that marked the start and the end of each day.

No lying down. No sleeping. That was the rule.

A bowl, a cup, and a toilet pail emptied twice weekly were the only other furnishings.

There was no window, no electrical light.

The only illumination was what came from the hallway through the fifteen-centimeter-square barred hole in the door—the door that she prayed would never again open.

She would rather stay inside her cell, slowly starving, than for her door to be opened again.

There had been screams during the day, echoing down from the interrogation rooms overhead.

Thankfully it was quiet now. With her eyes closed and slow, deep breathing, she was beginning to release some of the tension in her belly, enough for the hunger to reemerge from under the fear.

The evening meal had been a piece of half-cooked pumpkin, thrust through the slot in the door by a silent orderly pushing a cart with wheels that squeaked.

It would likely bring on cramps. The next meal—some sort of gruel, perhaps a lump of unsalted barley—would come in the morning.

The war could not go on much longer, but at the rate her flesh was disappearing, she doubted she could last to the end.

Footsteps outside. The Toad or one of the other guards was making the rounds. She sat up straight, communicating alertness, her eyes submissively downcast from the shadow as it passed by the grating. She stared at the scabbed-over cigarette burns on the back of her hand and running up her forearm.

The footsteps faded to the end of the hall, then returned. It was only after she heard them scuff their way back up the stairs that she allowed herself to relax.

Weariness overcame her. It always did after a meal, during that brief respite from gnawing hunger.

She lowered her head to her knees and let her eyelids drift closed, retreating back inside her mind, where she now spent most of her time.

There were lights waiting for her there in the darkness, dim yellow flashes floating like fireflies in the night.

She watched them for a time and they gradually grew brighter, like sparks from a fire, dancing up and flaring before drifting back down.

Greetings to all you GI boneheads. It’s Humanity Calls. With your favorite Radio Tokyo announcer, your very own sweetheart Sally. Did you miss me? Sure you did. I missed you, too.

She had arrived on the sixth floor of the NHK Building at one o’clock that afternoon, her usual time.

She had been finding the work difficult for the past two months, since the loss of their home and the death of their daughter.

After the initial debilitating grief had come a feeling of emptiness that wouldn’t leave her.

Emptiness. And confusion. Keizo had urged her to take more time off from work, but she couldn’t.

She had received pressure from NHK to return, for she was one of their best announcers.

And they needed her salary to adequately feed themselves.

The first task was to polish the script that Oita-san had prepared, turning his tortured English into something that sounded natural, something she could actually say.

She was able to take great liberties, rewriting virtually the whole thing, for Oita-san had come to trust her.

It was easy now that she knew the format, working in common American names, mocking taunts, and depressing items of stateside news from the list, fires and crashes and natural disasters.

Hi there, Pete! Hey, why so blue? I guess you must be feeling homesick.

Well, don’t let it get you down. Who wouldn’t be homesick, stuck on that island out in the Pacific, thousands of miles from home.

You’re missing your wife, your mom and dad, and everyone else.

That’s okay. Your sweetheart Sally knows how you feel.

She had the script completed by two-thirty.

She would read through it once or twice to practice and do some mouth exercises to get her voice in tune.

Then it was time for the three p.m. broadcast of Humanity Calls .

She always smiled as she read her lines into the microphone.

It was a trick Oita-san had taught her to create a happy, upbeat delivery.

Oita-san had taught her everything she knew about being a propaganda announcer, “a fighter in the ideological war,” as he put it, “shooting shortwave bullets.”

And that little boy of yours, Ted. You’re wondering if he’s okay.

Well, he’s thinking about you, too. And your mother, Frank—how’s she doing?

I hope she’s well. But Sally won’t lie to you.

Bad things happen every day. Stars and Stripes just doesn’t report it.

It only dishes out the upbeat jive for you boneheads.

So you didn’t hear about the train wreck in Boise that killed all those people.

Or the hotel fire in Sacramento. Or that airplane that crashed in—

Oh, but don’t worry about that now. Your sweetheart Sally doesn’t want you to worry. She doesn’t want you boneheads to be blue. So let’s get along and get to the music. Here we go, nice and slow, with Artie Shaw on his clarinet playing “Moonglow.”

She liked the music they played on the broadcast. Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, the Andrews Sisters, Tommy Dorsey.

Owning such records and listening to such music could get an ordinary Japanese citizen into serious trouble.

But here on the restricted sixth floor of the NHK Building, they were openly handled and played.

Fujimura-san appeared outside the glass window of the microphone booth and just stood there, staring at Noriko and getting in Oita-san’s way.

It was common knowledge that he was affiliated with the Tokkō, assigned to NHK to keep an eye on the American-born Nisei employees like Noriko who worked on the sixth floor.

Why else did he have a private office when he seemed to do so little actual work?

Noriko loathed him—his perpetually sour face, his open suspicion.

He had even suggested that Oita-san was allowing Noriko too much freedom to write her own scripts, claiming that she could be inserting coded messages into her broadcasts.

And then there was the way he treated the single women on staff, inviting them into his office and making advances, knowing that they would never dare to complain.

She shifted in her seat, pointedly turning away from the window to get Fujimura-san out of her field of vision. He eventually left.

This one’s going out to Walter in 8th Marines Regiment, 1st Battalion. Hi, Walter! Summer’s awfully hot on Okinawa, isn’t it? But listen, bonehead, because here’s a news flash. It’s not half as hot down there as it is in your hometown, back in the good old USA, where that special lady is waiting.

Oh, you didn’t hear? Well, she’s found a new beau. Do the initials T. S. sound familiar? A friend of yours, perhaps? I hate being the bearer of bad news, Walter. But isn’t knowing better than being kept in the dark?

I feel for you, kiddo. I really do. But keep your chin up, because Sally still loves you. Sweetheart Sally will never run around behind your back.

And so this one’s for you, Walter in 8th Marines Regiment, 1st Battalion. A nifty number with a Spanish title. Here we go, nice and slow, with the Glenn Miller Orchestra and “Perfidia.”

The seventy-five-minute broadcast ended at four-fifteen. The red light went out and Noriko left the booth. Oita-san gave her a smile and a nod. He had been worried about her since her personal tragedy, which was now so common. But she was doing well.

She returned to the desk she shared with another Nisei announcer, Ikuko Toguri, to collect her things.

Fujimura-san stuck his head out of his office. “Kan-san,” he said, “I want to have a word with you.”

Noriko stiffened. She didn’t want to go into Fujimura’s office alone. But she was a married woman. Surely he wouldn’t.

She was mistaken.

“I know all about you,” he said, closing the door and coming up behind her and placing his hand on her shoulder.

His hand descended.

Noriko wheeled about and struck him in the face.

The rap of a club on the cell door brought her back to the present.

The thick-featured guard she thought of as the Toad was standing outside, staring at her through the grate.

She sat up straight, demonstrating alertness as her heart palpitated.

The Toad tapped again, twice. She scrambled to her feet and stood at attention.

The guards sometimes insisted on this, keeping the prisoners in a constant state of apprehension.

The Toad moved on. His footsteps retreated.

Noriko remained standing, listening as he continued down the hallway, pausing here and there to issue warnings with his club.

One of the raps was repeated, followed by the guttural order, “Stand up!” Noriko had no idea who the unfortunate soul was who was being addressed.

There were perhaps thirty others confined down here, but she had never seen or communicated with any of them.

It was forbidden. She could hear them, however, the occasional cough during the day, snoring and cries and whimpers during the night.

The footsteps returned. Noriko remained standing at attention. The Toad passed by her cell door and continued on to the stairs leading up at the end of the hall.

The blast of the night whistle. Freed at last after fourteen hours of alternately sitting and standing, Noriko unrolled her futon and lay down. She heard a soft rustle from the next cell as her neighbor—man or woman, she didn’t know—did the same.

The speed with which Noriko had been arrested left no doubt as to Fujimura’s Tokkō affiliation.

She had committed an unpardonable offense, an assault on a member of Japan’s feared Thought Police.

She never saw him again, but she heard his accusations repeated in the interrogations to which she was subjected, the claim that she had inserted coded messages into her broadcasts.

She denied it. She tried to explain how Fujimura had made advances on all the Nisei and foreign women who worked at NHK on the sixth floor and treated them according to how compliant they were.

Only the elderly American missionary known as Mother Topping seemed to escape his attentions.

When he tried to take advantage of Noriko, she had rejected him and the present accusations against her were the result.

“Liar!” roared the interrogator, lunging out of his chair to spit the word in her face.

She repeated the story in a subsequent session and sparked a harsher response, a flurry of blows, then the cigarette burns.

She didn’t know if she would be strong enough to continue defending herself the next time she was questioned, for judging from the shrieks she had heard the treatment would only get worse.

Perhaps she shouldn’t even bother. Perhaps she should just admit to the crime and accept the release from life that would no doubt swiftly follow.

For there seemed little point in carrying on.

Her Aiko was dead and didn’t need her, her family was broken, and Japan itself was plodding inexorably toward annihilation.

It would probably all be over, for everyone, by the end of the year.

So it would only be a matter of leaving this life a little sooner.

And the fact remained that she was indeed guilty.

Not of treason. How did one even send coded messages via a radio broadcast? But of—

Her mind reeled away from the shame and the deeper horror behind it.

She gazed at the familiar dark stain on the floor, scarcely a foot from her nose.

It formed the face of a man, head slightly turned, eyes downcast. There was only the vaguest hint of features in the mark but in the dim light her imagination brought it to life.

It was her husband, Keizo, when she wanted him there, the shy and gentle soul she had married in San Francisco eight years before.

Should she have told him? No, what she had done could not be forgiven.

She lay in the darkness, listening to the sounds coming through the grating—the rustling, the breathing, the coughing, the weeping, the occasional sound of water as a toilet pail was used somewhere down the hall.

Here we go, nice and slow, with the Glenn Miller Orchestra and “Perfidia.”

She had always liked the music they played on Humanity Calls . She squeezed her eyes tight shut and tried to conjure the tune.

So here we go, nice and slow. The Glenn Miller Orchestra with “Perfidia.”

No music came.