My long-dead parents, my wife, my three daughters and my son-in-law knew nothing of my life as an operative of Unit 701. It was my secret. But first and foremost, it was a national secret. Of course, every country has its secrets, its clandestine organizations, classified weaponry, covert agents, secret … there is really no end to the numbers of secrets kept by a nation. It’s hard to imagine a country with no secrets. I wonder what such a nation would be like. But perhaps that’s just fantasy; such a country cannot exist, just like an iceberg would cease to be without its hidden mass lurking beneath the waves. Indeed, how can things exist independently of what is concealed beneath the surface? Sometimes I think that such secrets are terribly unfair, especially to those closest to the person keeping them. But if things weren’t like this, quite possibly the country I call home would have long since disappeared, or at least be under threat. You just have to let this unfairness continue to be unfair.

But having secrets does not mean one is some kind of criminal. Throughout the whole of my secretive life, I’ve never done anything I am ashamed of. You know my position: I wasn’t part of some frightening organization, I was part of a very important information-gathering agency, tasked with listening to the airwaves and decrypting ciphers. This type of agency exists in every country’s armed forces; so we can perhaps say that the existence of all these secrets is, in fact, an open secret. The real secrets are those surrounding the location of these agencies, the operatives who staff them, their methods, their frustrations and results – these types of things are what I would not tell you even if you beat me to death. These are the things that are more important than my life.

In Unit 701, people like Abing who intercepted communications across the airwaves are called ‘Wind Listeners’. Their ears put food on their plates; they serve as their weapons and their rice bowls; they are also the source of their stories. It goes without saying that to engage in the surveillance profession Unit 701 requires persons of singular auditory abilities. They must be able to hear that which the rest of us cannot, as well as distinguish between minute auditory inflections that pass beyond the notice of common folk. This is why most people hail them as having ‘preternaturally good hearing’. Such ears are said to go with the wind. Wherever the wind blows, their ears follow; there is nothing they do not hear, nothing they are unaware of. However, in that one year, in that single moment, all of us Wind Listeners were rendered silent by our enemies, for we all went completely deaf.