of a typhoon. I am suffering mildly from diarrhoea, but sickbay dispensed some effective medicine. We have lost contact with I-37, our sister submarine on this mission. An all-systems kaiten service took up most of the day. Following yesterday’s incident, Abe avoided speaking unless he had to. Kusakabe addressed him with rigid politeness. His left eye is half closed by a bruise. Goto told the crew that Kusakabe fell out of his bunk. I asked Kusakabe if his offer to lend me his book of English kabuki was still open, and Kusakabe said sure, and recommended a play about the greatest soldier in Rome. Listen: ‘Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it’s spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.’ Even when Abe came into our cabin I carried on reading it. Western military values are perplexing, however. The soldier, Coriolanus, talks about honour, but when he feels betrayed by the Romans, instead of registering his disapproval by hara-kiri, he deserts and fights for the enemy! Where is the honour in that? This afternoon an unescorted American freighter was sighted, but Cpt Yokota is under strictest orders not to fire a conventional torpedo until the kaiten mission is completed. Goto swore he for one would never breathe a word to Admiralty HQ if Cpt Yokota ignored this directive. I-47 sent a communiqué warning of two enemy destroyers SSE 20 kms, so we let the freighter escape. Later, Goto and I fabricated a model warship from card, and practised kaiten approach angles with a mock periscope. Then, as casually as a comment on the weather, Goto said, ‘Tsukiyama, I want to introduce you to my wife.’ For once, he was quite serious. He wedded her on our final weekend leave. ‘If she wants to remarry after my death,’ he said, more to himself than to me, ‘she has my blessing. She may have more than one husband, but I will only ever have one wife.’ Goto then asked me why I volunteered for special attack forces. It may strike you as odd that we never discussed this topic at Otsushima or even Nara, but our minds were too intricated in the ‘how’ to see the ‘why’. My answer was, and is, that I believe the kaiten project is the reason I was born.
Suga lumbers downstairs. ‘Hey.’
‘Hey.’ I close the journal. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘A ten-megaton headache.’
‘My boss keeps a first-aid box somewhere—’
‘I have a unique immunity to painkillers. I cleaned your toilet. I never cleaned one before. I hope I used the right cloths and stuff.’
‘Thank you.’
Suga sniffs and watches the screen for a while. It is an American movie – not many aren’t – I chose at random called An Officer and a Gentleman. From the box I thought it might be about the Pacific war and the navy my great-uncle fought, but I was way wrong. The star – he has a pained-rodent face – is stuck in boot camp in the 1980s. ‘Well,’ says Suga, ‘I see why you jacked in Ueno. Is this all you do? Sit on your butt and watch movies all day?’
‘Same as sitting on your butt and watching computer screens.’
Suga inspects the new-releases rack. ‘Living on borrowed time, these video shops. Pretty soon people will download all their videos via the Net, right. DCDI format. The technology is already here, just waiting for marketing to catch up. I meant to ask: what happened with that Korean babe you were chasing?’
‘Uh, mistaken identity.’
A kryptonite-green Jeep, throbbing with time-travel music, mounts the pavement. Lolita in the passenger seat spits cherry pips out of the window, while Dalai Lama darts in, nursing a fluffy white ferret – it sports a pink-and-lime bow tie – in one arm and three videos in the other. ‘Jason and the Argonauts thrilled us, Sinbad chilled us, Titanic killed us. Myths are no longer what they used to be. I should know – I wrote them.’ I check the return-by dates and thank him. Dalai Lama moonwalks out and waves the ferret’s paw at us. The ferret yawns. The Jeep jets off, red-shifting music into a squashed blur. Suga watches through the door. ‘I wish I had a friend like that. I could phone him up every time I felt like a misfit, right, just to remind myself how normal I actually