"Daikon"

Samuel Hawley is a Canadian writer with BA and MA degrees in history from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He was born and grew up in South Korea and taught English there and in Japan for many years. His books include The Imjin War, the definitive account in English of Japan’s 16th-century invasion of Korea and attempted conquest of China; Speed Duel, about the 1960s rivalry between Craig Breedlove and Art Arfons for the world land speed record; Ultimate Speed, the authorized biography of land speed racing legend Craig Breedlove; and The Fight That Started the Movies: The World Heavyweight Championship, the Birth of Cinema and the First Feature Film.

Hawley applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Daikon, and reported the following:

On page 69 of Daikon, we are meeting the fourth and final main character in the story, Noriko Kan. She is the wife of Dr. Keizo Kan, the scientist tasked with investigating the atomic bomb the Japanese have recovered from the wreckage of a crashed B-29. Noriko is a Japanese-American who Keizo met and married during his studies at UC Berkeley in the States. And she is now in prison. She has run afoul of the Tokko, the Japanese version of the Gestapo. Locked in her solitary prison cell, the propaganda broadcasts she used to make at Radio Tokyo run through her mind.

I think—I hope—the Page 69 Test works in the sense Marshall McLuhan intended, namely that a reader would find page 69 intriguing and compelling enough to want to read the whole novel. But in terms of giving a good idea of the whole book, what it’s about—maybe not. Noriko’s storyline in the novel is quite different from the rest.

That being said, she plays a key role in the dangerous game of cat-and-mouse between Colonel Sagara, the officer who wants to use the atomic bomb against the United States to stave off defeat, and Keizo Kan, ordered by Sagara to turn the recovered bomb into a workable weapon. Keizo doesn’t want to take on the job, but he does so, and risks his own life, in order to get his wife freed. This sets Noriko on a journey of redemption and survival, a starving wraith using her last reserves of strength to keep going on the long walk back to Tokyo to find her husband and try to rebuild their lives.

Visit Samuel Hawley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue