Page 32 of Daikon

SIXTEEN

HEY, GI. ARE YOU LISTENING ? Are you out there?

Because your sweetheart Sally has something to tell you.

Sally doesn’t want you to worry, but the little lady you thought was waiting back home is sitting down to write you a letter.

Up at the top of the page she’s writing “Dear Charlie.” Or is it “Dear Robert”?

Or “Dear George”? Or “Dear Sam”? But that’s not what she’s really thinking.

Do you know what she’s thinking? She’s thinking, “Dear John.”

Stop it. Stop it.

She shifted, searching for a less uncomfortable position. Where was the evening whistle? Surely it was time for the evening whistle. She wanted desperately to unroll the futon and lie down, just to stretch out her aching body, if not to sleep.

She tried to concentrate on something else.

The shadow of Senso-ji Temple near their house in Asakusa took form in her mind.

She and Keizo had often walked there in the first years of their marriage.

The first time with Aiko… that was when they bought the omikuji fortune paper.

They had shaken the hexagonal box, worn by generations of hands, until one of the long sticks inside protruded from the hole in the end.

“Number seventy-one,” she said, reading the number on the stick to the old woman in the booth who was dispensing fortunes as she ate her lunch.

Keizo handed over a coin, and the woman, still chewing, extracted a paper from one of the numbered drawers at her side.

“Ah, we’re doomed,” said Keizo, chuckling at the line of characters at the top. “Look at that. ‘Number Seventy-One. Misfortune.’?”

The poem beneath, about dark clouds obscuring the moon, suggested trouble ahead.

But the more specific auguries weren’t entirely bad.

They read them together, going along with the old custom.

Travel to the south was to be avoided. There would be a long sickness, but the patient would recover.

An awaited person would come. And a business venture would start slowly but eventually prosper.

“What do you say?” said Keizo, grinning at her in amusement. “Shall we open a shop?”

They folded the paper lengthwise into a long, narrow strip and tied it to the branch of a nearby pine tree, explaining to Aiko that this would leave the misfortune behind at the temple.

Was the pine tree still there?

You see, she’s found herself another man. There are so many to choose from, some of them right on her street. She got feeling blue one day—

Stop it! Stop it!

Where was the evening whistle?

Or was it perhaps still only morning?

The crack of a club striking the door made her jump.

“Stand up!”

It was the Toad, glaring at her through the grate. Noriko Kan jumped to her feet and stood with head bowed. The sudden exertion made stars dance before her eyes in the gloom.

The sound of a key in the lock. The Toad was opening the door. But she had been sitting, not lying down. She hadn’t broken the rules.

He pushed the door open and remained in the hallway. “Come out!”

Noriko didn’t move. Her limbs were frozen.

“Come out !” The Toad punctuated the command by striking the door again with his club.

Noriko obeyed.

The Toad stood behind her, his mouth close to her ear. “Be careful what you say,” he said. “Be very careful.”

He marched her down the hallway and prodded her onto the stairs leading upward, up to the place she was afraid to return to, the unmarked door with the dark square at the center where a label had been.

The Toad knocked.

A muffled voice inside: “Come in.”

The Toad opened the door. “The prisoner!”

He pushed Noriko inside, gave a curt bow, and turned away, closing the door.

It wasn’t the Tokkō captain this time seated behind the table. It was an older man, late fifties, a civilian with the look of an office manager or government official.

“Sit down,” he said blandly, without glancing up from the files he was perusing. Tendrils of smoke snaked from a cigarette in the ashtray by his right hand.

Noriko’s legs were quaking so badly that she was unable to move. She stood there, staring at the floor. The stranger finally noticed her hesitation.

“Sit down,” he repeated.

His voice and manner seemed benign. She risked another glance at his upraised face. It had none of the Tokkō captain’s look of menace and contempt.

“Please.” He motioned Noriko to the chair. “Sit.”

She willed her legs to step forward. She lowered herself onto the edge of the chair facing the table. She sat very still with her knees pressed together, hands clutched protectively against her abdomen, head down.

“Are you being treated adequately well?” the man asked, his eyes returning to the file.

There was only one possible answer. “Yes,” Noriko said in a small voice.

“Good, good.”

The man fell silent as he continued to read, pausing now and then to pick up his pen and make a notation. He finished the first page, turned it over, and started the next.

“The Imperial Army has taken an interest in your case,” he said, starting on the third page. “I’ve been asked to clarify a few things.”

The Imperial Army has taken an interest in your case…

The words hit Noriko like an electrical shock. Her husband, Keizo, had worked closely with the Army. He knew high-ranking officers. Perhaps…

She risked another look up at the stranger, suddenly hopeful. He was underlining something, two precise strokes.

He set his pen down. He leaned back and fixed her with an unwavering gaze.

“So. You were born in America.”

He spoke politely, not the tone of her previous interrogations.

“Yes,” Noriko acknowledged in a whisper, keeping her head down.

“A little louder, please.”

“Yes,” she repeated.

“San Francisco.” He retrieved his cigarette from the ashtray and drew in a lungful of smoke. “I’ve been there. A beautiful city.” He smiled and added in English: “Golden Gate Bridge. Fisherman’s Wharf.”

Noriko didn’t know how to respond. It was unwise to say anything positive about the United States. She remained silent.

“Your father was from Shizuoka-ken, I see. Where exactly?”

“Mishima.”

“And when did he emigrate to the United States?”

“In 1908.” Noriko had already gone over all this multiple times with the Tokkō captain. “He worked at my uncle’s lunch counter. Then he started his own.”

“A chain of lunch counters, I see here,” said the stranger, tapping the file.

“Only three.”

“And an import-export business. I would call that successful.”

Noriko’s face darkened. “My father lost everything in 1942. He was forced to close his business, and my family was sent to a prison camp.” That was the last news she had received from America, in a letter from her mother that had somehow reached her via Hong Kong.

“Was that when you decided to give up your American passport?”

Noriko nodded.

The stranger jotted down a note. “Yes, well, before all that, your father was successful—successful enough to send you to the University of California. English literature and business courses. It was there that you met your husband, I take it.”

Noriko nodded.

The stranger let out an exasperated sigh. “We’ll get through this faster if you’ll be forthcoming.”

“He was a doctoral student,” said Noriko quickly. “I interviewed him for the student newspaper. We were married in 1936, and I returned with him to Japan the next year.”

A rustle of paper. The man was consulting the file.

“Keizo Saito. He took your family name. Kan.”

“Yes. My husband is a second son, and I have no brothers. He agreed to be entered into our family register to continue the name.”

“But you had no son to perpetuate the family name. Only a daughter. Pity.”

Noriko only nodded.

The stranger continued. “Where did he work, your husband? After you returned to Japan?”

“At the Riken. For Dr. Nishina at the Riken.”

“Yes, at the Riken. What did you know of his work?”

Noriko hesitated. “I knew very little.”

“Did he tell you about it?”

“He said he was investigating cosmic rays. I didn’t understand.”

“What about later? After 1943?”

“He didn’t talk about his work then.”

“Never? Did you know he was involved in a secret project?”

Noriko thought carefully before responding. “Yes, I knew.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Nothing. My husband never talked about it.”

“Nothing? You know nothing?”

“No, nothing. I know nothing.”

“You never questioned him? You never tried to find out?”

“Never. He told me his work was sensitive and that I shouldn’t question him about it. So I didn’t.”

“You weren’t curious?”

“I suppose I was curious. But I never asked.”

“Did you ever see any of his papers? Anything that might have given you an idea of what he was involved in?”

“No. Never. He never brought papers home.”

“I find that difficult to believe. Surely he brought something home. Perhaps you took a glance at it? An innocent glance? By mistake?”

“Never,” Noriko replied, emphatically shaking her head even though it wasn’t true. Keizo had been careless with his papers. “Never. My husband was extremely careful. He never brought anything home.”

The stranger finished his cigarette and crushed out the butt. He extracted a pack from the pocket of his short-sleeved white shirt, tapped out another, and slowly, deliberately, lit it.

“Is that so.”

His chair scraped back. He stood up and paced the length of the room, thoughtfully smoking.

“Is that so.”

He turned at the wall and paced back to stand behind Noriko’s chair. She cringed, anticipating that the session might turn violent, that this stranger might have a hidden malevolent side.

“And yet,” the man continued without raising his voice, “here you are. Arrested. You were accused of being insincere, a defeatist, a traitor. And you are imprisoned here. Let’s talk about that.”

Noriko pressed her clenched fists into her stomach. “It had nothing to do with my husband.”

“No?”

“It was at my place of work.”

“Your place of work. Tell me about that.”