DAIKON

As Japan teeters on the abyss of doom, a strange American bomb falls into its hands.

In 1945, B-29s turn Japanese cities into fiery hellscapes, but Japan fights on in a hopeless cause. A U.S. bomber nicknamed Wicked Intent crashes and kills its crew. Japanese civilians who discover the wreckage don’t know what to make of the puzzling object that had been inside and is buried in the dirt nearby, looking “like a big black daikon radish.” They conclude it’s the biggest bomb anyone has ever seen. Inside the device are rings of metal no one recognizes, but a simple chemistry lab test shows it to be uranium. Army Lt. Col. Shingen Sagara understands the significance. He knows about Japan’s own unsuccessful efforts to enrich uranium. To figure out how to make the stray bomb workable to unleash horror on enemy forces or even on America itself, he recruits the U.S.-educated physicist Keizo Kan, who has been working in his garden. The scientist despises war, and he desperately wants to find his beloved American-born wife, Noriko, who has been arrested and detained for unknown reasons. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay area, they share a deep fondness for U.S. movies: “Taylor loves Garbo,” he tells her before the war. “Garbo loves Taylor,” she responds with a kiss. From a distance Sagara witnesses the fireball over Hiroshima, and he knows what it is. He will do everything in his power to have the discovered bomb loaded onto a plane to smite America. Nagasaki soon follows, as history confirms. But the fictional third atomic bomb might still deliver a devastating blow. Meanwhile, there is talk of a coup to overthrow the “defeatists” who want to surrender. The plot feels entirely plausible, and none of the characters fit any obvious stereotypes. Sagara, the antagonist, is addicted to Philopon, a methamphetamine that drives his relentless work. (This was a real product considered so dangerous that Japan banned it after the war.) Were it up to him, every Japanese citizen would “eat stones”—fight to the death. The author’s research is impressive as he describes how the bomb is designed to work, the tensions within the Japanese power structure, and details of Japanese culture.

An engrossing and thought-provoking novel.