about the book. It's illegal to write about the A-bomb in Occupied Japan. He thinks Japan deserved it after Pearl Harbor. He decides to subject them to thought modification. A fellow prisoner explains that the Cannon Agency, a special operations team that runs covert actions for American interests, named after its director, Col. Jack Cannon, will torture them to try to turn them into spies. Later, in 1953, in the basement of the Iwasaki Mansion, torture devices and a water dungeon were exposed by writer Wataru Kaji after he was kidnapped and detained secretly for more than a year. Many others were never seen again. Gen, Ryuta, and Noro can't escape while locked in a cell, so Gen wounds himself with a loose nail, smears the blood, and tells the others to act ill. A guard is about to take them to the infirmary, but Lt. Kurota has seen this old trick before. Gen then trains them to be able to take torture better, while faking greater pain. First they're laughing about it, then quarreling angrily as they attack each other. Lt. Kurota concludes they've gone out of their minds and are useless for his purposes, so he orders them to be dumped. Gen vows revenge. The kids laugh at a taxi driver having a tantrum. He explains that someone has put sugar in his tank, ruining his means of livelihood. Gen asks Mr. Pak for sugar cubes—it's safer if he doesn't know why—so they can put American jeeps and trucks out of commission, creating work for Japanese mechanics. Gen puts on an impromptu comedy show to distract the Americans as the others commit sabotage. Returning home, he finds his mother home from the hospital, seemingly cured, but Akira reveals that she has 4 months to live and doesn't know it. Her stomach cancer has metastasized. It's hard for Gen and Akira to pretend all is well. As she talks about her arranged marriage to their father, who she grew to love, and how people who were against the war were tortured and killed even before it had started, Gen determines to earn money to send his mother to visit Kyoto, where she'd honeymooned, a last time. He finds out there's money to be made collecting poop for fertilizer. Koji arrives, having heard the news about their mother, full of shame for having drunk up the money he should have