“You think I’m going to give the Navy my money?” Jiro asked his younger son. “Am I that dumb?”

“No, Father,” Kenzo answered. “But accidents can happen.”

“Accidents. Oh, yes. They can happen,” Jiro Takahashi said. “They can, but they’d better not.” Straying into the defensive sea area wouldn’t be an accident, though. It would be a piece of stupidity Jiro had no intention of allowing. His boat went where it was supposed to.

A seaplane buzzed by overhead. A Navy man with a radio was probably reporting the Oshima Maru ’s position. Well, let him, Jiro thought. I’m not in their restricted area, and they can’t say I am.

On went the fishing boat. Pearl Harbor and Honolulu sank below the horizon. Jiro and his sons ate rice and pork his wife, Reiko, had packed for them. They drank tea. Hiroshi and Kenzo also drank Coca-Cola. Jiro had tried the American drink, but didn’t think much of it. Too sweet, too fizzy.

It was the middle of the afternoon before they got to a spot Jiro judged likely. He couldn’t have said why he thought it would be good. It felt right, that was all. Some combination of wind and waves and water color told him the tuna were likely to be here. When he was a boy, he’d gone out with his father to fish the Inland Sea of Japan. His father had seemed able to smell a good catch. When Jiro asked him how he did it, he’d just laughed. “If you know fish, you know where they go,” he’d said. “You’ll figure it out.”

And Jiro had. He glanced over to his strapping sons. Would they? He didn’t want to bet on it. Too many things distracted them. He could get them to fish with him, and even to do a good enough job while they were here. But he could have trained a couple of Portuguese cowboys from a cattle ranch on the Big Island to do that. It wouldn’t have made them fishermen, and it didn’t make Hiroshi and Kenzo fishermen, either. To them, this was only a job, and not such a good one. To Jiro, it was a way of life.