Word: tadashi
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...translator, after having served 16 years in the Self-Defense Forces. Although raised in Fukuoka, he was born in 1942 in Nagasaki because his mother, following custom, returned to her natal city for the birth. Because of that, as well as to escape air raids near Fukuoka, she and Tadashi returned again to Nagasaki in August of 1945 for the birth of his brother...
...does not remember the explosion. But he remembers his anger when, a few years later, classmates began dying from radiation-induced leukemia. He has worked to put the bitter memory behind him. As a survivor of the nuclear fire, Tadashi receives free lifetime medical care, and he reports twice annually for a physical examination. Perhaps because one of the high hills of Nagasaki stood between him and the epicenter, his health is good...
...Tadashi and I had left the bullet train, on which we got to know each other, at Niigata and had taken a limited southwest down along the blue Sea of Japan. At the coastal city of Itoigawa we caught a primitive local that followed the Fossa Magna, that grand cleft dividing interior Japan, up into the Hida range. The train chugged upcountry, passing through hot-spring villages where station names were no longer in Roman letters, passing the jade mines at Kotaki. The railroad paralleled the Himekawa, a river that seemed to flow granite, so stony and gray...
...listening, there started up in the near pines an unearthly sound. Out it went, then from farther away returned a call and, from farther yet, still another, until the slopes rang with cries. I asked what bird it was that made that noise. "Can it be a real bird?" Tadashi said. "Wild monkeys also live in these mountains." The last thing he said was, "Who sleeps with such a bird going...
Instead of the road, Tadashi and I followed the short cut under the big pines into the valley orchards and vineyards. The rocky soil was fertile once it got water, so, although too far above the river here for paddyfields, it produced fruit, melons and chestnuts through a computer-controlled sprinkler system. Down the dusty road until we reached a farmhouse. Tadashi knew the son and his bride...