“For example, this,” she said. “Today, quite to our surprise, the General made an inspirational visit to our battalion. He was so pleased with our work he penciled around one area on the map of Nanjing and gave us a suburb.”

“What does that mean?” Siri asked.

“I phoned my advisor in Bangkok,” said Kyoko. “She’s a historian. I read her the passage. She said that as a reward for productivity and loyalty, the senior officers would give a suburb to a unit of soldiers. There would be no holds barred. The soldiers in the unit could take anything or anybody they wished within the borders allocated. They could mete out punishment on the Chinese in that suburb for any infringement. They could destroy property, torture, kill, rape. There were no rules. It was their reward and, as the Japanese military saw the Chinese as inferior beings, there were no moral conflicts. Your friend Toshi was honored to be congratulated in such a way.”

Siri sighed.

Kyoko turned to another marked page and translated, “It was our great honor today to be able to follow the eighth battalion on their victorious march on Chuzhou. The bodies of the enemy were piled six feet high on either side of the road. There were women and children in those stacks and our glorious commander informed us that the Chinese animals were so unscrupulous that they recruited such people as spies and suicide bombers.”

The food was on the table but only Beer was eating. Siri had lost his appetite. Of course he’d learned of the Japanese atrocities in China but hearing them anew from Toshi’s point of view felt like . . . like what? Like betrayal. Siri had come to like the man from his light and humorous diary entries. But to discover he was a war puppet, a man without scruples, a beast: that was more than he could take in. It was as if he’d lost a friend.

“Is it like that all the way?” he asked.

“As far as I got,” said Kyoko. “There’s just . . .”

“What?”

“There’s something about the style of his writing that doesn’t seem . . . natural.”

“In what way?”

“It’s a little like reading a textbook. Even the few personal entries are impersonal. Everything he sees and does makes him ‘so proud to honor the emperor.’ That and a few dozen other well-used wartime clichés crop up on every page. He talks about death clinically. There isn’t a single euphemism. There is no difference between his choice of language describing mass rape and that talking about the lack of space in a warehouse to store rice.”

“What does that say to you?” Siri asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, absently chasing her food around the plate. “Either your Toshi is a complete automaton . . .”

“Or?”

“Or he was expecting someone to read his diary. I got the feeling he wasn’t necessarily writing for himself.”