“What?”

“Daeng. Look at this.”

She leaned over the page.

“Well, I’ll be,” she said.

The Japanese text ended halfway down the page and was replaced with the date 12/30/1940, in Western numerals, and the Lao sentence My name is Kangen Toshimado (咸元利圓). The Lao lettering was childish but it was legible, and to Siri’s eyes, it seemed to introduce a sudden burst of fun: a hibiscus sprouting suddenly in a cabbage patch.

“Our Comrade Toshimado’s learning Lao,” said Daeng.

Siri turned the page and there was Toshimado agreeing with her.

I am studying Lao, he wrote.

A week or two had passed in diary time but he’d obviously been practicing his lettering. Daeng turned the page and read the entry for 1/6/1941.

I am Japanese. I am a major in the Imperial Army of Japan. I am thirty-four years old. My friends call me Toshi.

With every page they turned, the Lao language seemed to spread like a virus over the paper. On 1/24/1941 he attempted his first full page. There were mistakes here and there but they all suggested that Toshi was enjoying his journey through this new language. He wrote about traveling across the Lao countryside with his friend and eating and drinking local delicacies. He threw it all down on the page, hang the consequences. Suddenly, after three years of beautiful but disciplined Japanese text, his words had flamboyance.

The penlight was made in China so neither of them was surprised when the feeble beam gave up the ghost. It was a sign of the times. Soviet donations were ugly and almost indestructible. Chinese donations looked like the originals but didn’t work, yet the donors still believed the third world should be grateful.

“Let’s go inside and read some more,” said Daeng.

“A riddle first,” said Siri. “Why do you think someone would send me the diary of a Japanese soldier?”

“Because they knew you were desperate for reading material?”

“I admit it will be fun to read but they’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get this to me in one piece. My guess is that there has to be a point.”

“You sure there isn’t a letter in there?”

“I didn’t look.”

He held up the diary by the spine and, recklessly, fanned through the pages. At first nothing happened. Then a single page came loose. It was caught briefly in the lamplight from the shop as it surfed a breeze. It was almost impossible to follow its course but it was clear to both of them that it was headed in the direction of the river. Before it could hit the water it was out of sight.

Dr. Siri and Mr. Geung arrived at the morgue just before the sun rose. They’d both held on to their keys for old times’ sake. The place didn’t get a great deal of use. It wasn’t that people were no longer dying, rather that decisions were made at higher levels as to whether anyone really needed to know how or why. As in all good socialist states, the mechanism of secrecy was the most oiled. Mr. Geung pulled out the sliding tray and was delighted to see that Comrade Thinh’s nose mustache had grown a good two centimeters since his last visit. But, to their unrelenting surprise, the hair on Thinh’s head was also considerably longer and the finger- and toenails had begun to curl into claws. It defied all logic but this was a mystery that would have to wait. Their purpose for visiting the morgue was to find answers to more earthly questions. They lifted the body onto the cutting table and removed the sheet. It served no purpose other than modesty and Comrade Thinh really had nothing to be modest about.