From the Fatherland, with Love

And the homeless are the easiest people in the world to kill.

Ryokuchi Park had been run by yakuza, and there were thousands of other occupants, so no one ever bothered them. But elsewhere around the country the homeless were being harassed and even murdered daily.

Nokonoshima Island was famous in Japan for its beaches and fishing spots. In the pamphlets, the white beaches seemed to stretch for ever. A lot of fruit was grown on the island, and the pamphlets mentioned a seedless papaya. Tateno was fascinated by this. If the papaya didn’t have any seeds, what was in the core of the fruit? He was determined one of these days to go to Nokonoshima, eat a seedless papaya, and sail his boomerangs over that pure white sand.

some politicians said the country would soon face starvation. But neither Tateno nor anyone else in the Ishihara group was afraid of going hungry. They had all experienced things much worse than that.

I hate pain and would rather not see things like terror and violence and murder in the world, but sometimes the little people have no other choice.

Terrorism is awesome, violence is awesome, and even murder is awesome, but war sucks. War is for the mojority. Not majority but mojority. The little people are always the ones who lose. That’s why the only ones who want war are the mojority. They either bully the little people or ignore them altogether.

Ishihara seemed neither to like nor to dislike Takei or Kaneshiro, or anyone else for that matter. He continued writing his poems, aloof from the minutiae of everyday life and growing increasingly sage-like and mystical.

But because he spent all his time thinking up ever bigger projects, he’d never actually done anything.

Kaneshiro was a guy who was interested in nothing but terrorism and devising different schemes for large-scale attacks

Shinohara and Yamada had told him that Takei’s arrival and all this talk of revolution were what triggered Nobue’s departure. Nobue didn’t like Takei. And he became completely disillusioned and left for good when young Kaneshiro joined the group.