“That’s quite interesting,” said Kyoko. “But I don’t think so. In fact, I know for certain that his unit did not exist.”

The visitors sat forward on their seats.

“Tell us,” said Daeng.

“Look at this,” said Kyoko.

She removed a roll of papers from her bag and opened them on the desk. The pages contained columns of Japanese characters that meant nothing to the Lao or to Beer.

“My instincts were sparked by the names of Toshi’s coworkers and of Toshi himself, for that matter,” she said. “He introduces them all phonetically using Lao letters, but he very kindly adds the Japanese characters—that we call kanji—in parentheses. I might have ignored them but for the fact that most of the names are unusual. Of course they could all be the names of Japanese men. But imagine a list of Frenchmen. You’d expect to find one or two Martins, a Thomas or two, a Petit; traditional names with one or two unusual names like Quint thrown in. But you wouldn’t expect to find ten Frenchmen with bizarre names on the same list. So I wrote down here the original kanji spelling for each of the men in Toshi’s unit. All of them were completely odd.”

“How do you mean?” Siri asked.

“Well, for example, ‘Kyo’ in my name could be written using any one of twenty different kanji with twenty different meanings. You wouldn’t expect your mother to choose a horrible name for her daughter, so you’d look for the meaning amongst the lovely kanji like ‘reverent’ or ‘respectful.’ But the mothers of the men in Toshi’s unit must have hated their sons. Either that or Toshi was trying to tell us something. Of course it all comes down to interpretation, but here is a list of the meanings of the names Toshi gave to his team.”

She pointed to the names one by one.

“If we are to believe the kanji, Major General Dorari Momoyotsu might very well have been ‘a blasphemous mad donkey with four spleens,’” she said. “Lance Corporal Hokofugu Hama is ‘a leftover fish with a tiny banana.’ Warrant Officer Ukabane Orimimi is ‘a lying corpse with blocked ears.’ Oshiira’s ‘a mute pain in the arse who lost his vegetables,’ Tetsukimo is ‘a licentious being with a gall bladder like noodles,’ and Konko ‘a spittle of old cannabis roots.’ Our friend Toshi obviously had tremendous fun selecting the most insulting names. You see? As I say, it could have just been a joke, his way of making fun of his fellow soldiers or of protecting them. But I didn’t think so. The only positive impression I had of him from the earlier diary in Japanese was how methodical he was. There had to be something else.