Page 30 of Daikon
FIFTEEN
THE FREIGHT TRAIN JOSTLED AND swayed its way through the darkness, following the Tokaido Main Line northeast along the coast toward Tokyo.
Keizo Kan and Petty Officer Yagi sat side by side with their backs to the plank wall of an empty boxcar, the uranium bomb, the Daikon, secured to the floor at their feet, illuminated by the soft glow of a shaded lantern.
It was hot and they were both sweating. Yagi was stripped to the waist as he dozed.
There was no sleep for Kan. Between his sore nose from Colonel Sagara’s blow, the worry gnawing at his brain and the cramps gripping his guts, he could not relax enough to drift off.
He felt the tips of the fingers on his right hand, the fingers that had touched the burning hot uranium ring. The tingling was verging into discomfort. And now these abdominal cramps. Was it just his nerves? His high-strung nature? Bad digestion, perhaps? Or something more?
He held his watch up to the dim light. Nine o’clock in the evening. It had been six hours since the onset of this new symptom.
He breathed in the musty aroma of jute that permeated the boxcar.
It was a smell he associated with the warehouses of Saito Trading, the family business begun by his grandfather, brought to great success by his father and now wrecked by the war.
Keizo had never been interested in joining the firm, and his father thankfully had not pressed him, supporting him instead in his academic pursuits.
Private tutors had been hired to pave the way to Tokyo Imperial University, the best in the country.
Then doctoral studies in America under the great minds at UC Berkeley—all paid for by his father, a significant financial burden.
Keizo had been glad to leave it all behind, to leave Saito Trading to his bullying elder brother Keigo, Keigo who had inherited their father’s forceful side and none of his gentleness, which had gone wholly to Keizo.
Keigo liked to prowl through warehouses and bellow at workers, to argue with suppliers and buyers to squeeze out the maximum profit.
But that wasn’t in Keizo’s nature. He preferred physics.
There was beauty in physics, a way to see the sublime symmetry of nature.
There was immutability in physics, universal laws spanning space and time and governing everything that existed.
But above all, there was mystery in physics.
Kan often had the sense, especially earlier in his career, that he was standing knee-deep on the edge of an ocean of knowledge where unimaginable secrets lay hidden. What would be discovered out there?
And now this.
He regarded the sinister mass at his feet, the Daikon under its shroud of canvas. Pure destruction.
He closed his eyes and rested his forehead on his knees and let his mind drift back to Hamamatsu—to the bomb being loaded onto a truck for transport to the rail line; to Colonel Sagara, the wildness returning to his eyes, climbing into the back seat of a fighter.
Kan was glad that Sagara had decided to fly on ahead.
The sooner he was back in Tokyo, the sooner he could act on his promise to get Noriko freed.
She might even be released the next day.
Where would she go? Almost certainly to the Riken.
That was where they had lived following the loss of their home, squeezed into a small room in the workers’ dormitory that hadn’t burned down.
She had no other place to go.
He moved the gramophone into the closet and hung a quilt over the door to keep the neighbors from hearing.
Western music had been banned. The records they had brought from San Francisco could get them into trouble, so they had to go.
They put Aiko to bed and together squeezed into the small space and spent the evening listening to the disks one last time.
They listened to “Blue Moon” by Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra, then he removed it from the turntable and broke it.
They listened to “Seventh Heaven” by Abe Lyman and His Californians, then he broke it.
They listened to “The Words Are in My Heart” by Russ Morgan and His Orchestra, then he broke it.
It was a sorrowful occasion. They spoke little. They stared at the floor.
A certain constraint now existed between them.
His recruitment to Project Ni-Go had no doubt played a large part.
His work at the Riken consumed more and more of his time and obliged him to be careful about what he revealed at home.
Then Noriko had started working at NHK, pursuing a career of her own and leaving Aiko with a neighbor.
And then there was the mounting pressure for her to evacuate Tokyo with Aiko and go to Kanagawa to live with his parents.
He didn’t blame Noriko for not wanting to go.
His mother’s capacity for finding fault with her American-born daughter-in-law was seemingly endless and often bordered on cruel.
But the worsening war situation was leaving them little choice.
They listened to “Dancing Under the Stars,” then he broke it.
They listened to “Living from Day to Day,” then he broke it.
They listened to “It’s Love I’m After,” then he broke it…
The train took a hard lurch, jerking Kan from a doze. Yagi, roused from a deeper sleep, stretched and yawned like a cat. He got to his feet to peer out a crack in the side of the boxcar as they slowed.
The train jolted to a stop. There was the sound of the huffing engine up front, then the crunch of boots on gravel outside.
The metal screech of a bolt. The door slid open. A rat-faced soldier looked in, handed Yagi a thermos and two small packets, and stepped back to close the door again.
Yagi stuck his foot out to stop him. “Leave it open. It’s hot in here.”
The soldier gave him a threatening look. “Move back.”
Kan scrambled to his feet, the urge suddenly strong. “Excuse me, I need to go outside for a moment.”
The soldier slid the door shut with a bang and bolted it from the outside.
“Excuse me!” Kan knocked on the side of the boxcar. “I need to step outside for a moment!”
“Hey!” roared Yagi, banging on the planks with his fist. “The Sensei needs to go!”
No good. The soldier was gone.
“Bastard,” Yagi muttered, returning to his spot and slumping back down. He set one packet aside for Kan and went to work on the other, two balls of millet wrapped in seaweed with a salted red plum. He took a big bite, then looked up at Kan’s obvious discomfort.
He motioned toward the end of the boxcar. “Go down there. A little shit won’t bother me.”
Kan faltered, eyeing the dark corner. Then urgency overcame embarrassment. He scurried to the spot, clutching his stomach, and managed to get his trousers down just in time.
“Pardon me,” he said when he was finished, washing his hands in the pail of water that had been provided before they set out.
Yagi ignored him and continued sucking his teeth.
Kan sat back down and opened his food packet and started gingerly eating.
A jerk and a screech and the train was moving again.
“Why’d they have to lock us in here?” muttered Yagi. “Treating us like prisoners…”
He got up and returned to the crack in the wall to peer out. He stiffened, apparently having spotted someone outside.
“Hey!” he called out. “Where are we!”
No answer.
He started walking down the length of the car like an animal in a cage, striking at the plank sides with his fist. He reached the end and started back up the other side, still striking.
Then he stopped, a pair of planks attracting his particular interest. He banged on them a few times, verifying that they sounded rotten.
Then he stepped back and kicked them out, opening a half-meter-wide hole in the side of the car and letting in a warm breeze.
“That feels better,” said Kan as Yagi sat back down. “But won’t you get into trouble?”
Yagi snorted. “That? It was like that when they locked us in here.”
He took out his dice and started rolling them in his hand, expertly manipulating them with his fingers. The hypnotic movement seemed to relax him. His scowl slowly dissolved.
He helped himself to more cold tea from the thermos. Draining the cup, he began to lazily wave it around, making circles in the air, rotating his wrist.
He dropped the dice into the cup and began to swirl it, making the dice swish.
He brought the cup down with a smack on the floor of the boxcar, the dice hidden underneath.
“Even!”
He lifted the cup, revealing the dice. A six and a four, equaling ten. Even.
He swept the dice back into the cup, swirled it around and brought it down again with a bang.
“Odd!”
He lifted the cup, revealing a one and a six, equaling seven. Odd.
“You’re good,” observed Kan, swallowing the last of his millet.
“I listen to the sound of the dice,” said Yagi, swirling the cup close to his ear. “It takes practice. Even or odd, the sound is a bit different.”
Kan gave him an incredulous look. “Really? You can actually hear it?”
Yagi burst out laughing. “Of course not! It’s just luck. Come on, let’s play.”
It took Yagi ten minutes to relieve Kan of the coins in his pocket. Being a good sport, he returned them, then won them all back again.
Three o’clock in the morning. A thundering downpour, then the train was slowing again.
Kan and Yagi stood side by side at the hole Yagi had kicked in the side of the boxcar, gazing out at a dripping, desolate rail yard, then a sign creeping by announcing that they were passing through Numazu.
It was only a modest-sized town, but the B-29s had not overlooked it.
The entire moonlit nightscape was a ruin, brick buildings reduced to burned-out shells, wooden structures reduced to ashes.
Numazu had been razed by conventional bombing just as thoroughly as Hiroshima had been obliterated by the atomic bomb.
“This used to be a pretty town,” said Kan.