Upon delivering these cryptic words, he stood and left the classroom. None of us knew what to do. Nevertheless this very strange lecture stayed with us always, and we never forgot what it was he had said. In the days that followed, as I became more familiar with actual ciphers, I discovered – more and more – that what he had said during that class summed up the work perfectly. Some people may say that decrypting ciphers is a lonely job, a shadowy career that takes place in yet deeper shadows. Perhaps that’s true. But besides the necessary skill and training required, besides experience and a measure of innate ability, decrypting ciphers needs luck more than anything else – a luck that comes from far beyond the stars. Such good fortune isn’t something you can strive for, let alone demand. You simply have to trust in it. You need to learn how to grin and bear the inevitable failures, you need to study how to be patient. Even if you burn with anxiety you need to wait, perhaps even beyond the end of time. And yet this reasoning, this description of my career … it still doesn’t compare to what he said. That strange speech has been etched into my memory. What he said was so simple and yet so penetrating. He took something that seemed so profound, so abstruse, and summed it up in just a few words. With that speech, he allowed me to see what career it was that I had begun to devote my life to; he expanded my horizon, he allowed me to take hold of it.

He really understood the nature of cryptography.

The man I am talking about was your father.

Half a month later I was assigned to Unit 701’s cryptography division and began my long association with your father. I’ve told you if I had been given a choice, I wouldn’t have chosen this career, but since I didn’t have a choice, coming to know your father, working with him day and night, was the most enormous piece of good fortune. To be honest, I still have not met anyone in the world of cryptography who has the sensitivity and ability to decrypt ciphers that your father did. He had some spiritual connection to ciphers, like the relationship between a child and its mother. There just seemed to be a natural connection between them and him, a blood tie as it were. He was an extraordinary cryptographer. He also possessed another exceptional quality: determination. No matter what the cost, no matter how hopeless the situation, he would persevere. His knowledge and determination complemented each other. They were compatible, they worked in unison, and they were more than double what normal people had. The way he went about his work, calmly but with the confidence of vast experience, couldn’t help but boost your morale and also make you feel feeble and powerless at the same time.