He cut the motor. The Oshima Maru drifted silently on the light chop. Not far away, a booby plunged into the sea. It came out with a fish in its beak. That was a good sign. The booby wasn’t big enough to catch a tuna, of course, but it caught the sort of fish on which tuna fed. If they were here, the tuna probably would be, too.

Nodding to his sons, he said, “Throw in the bait.”

Hiroshi tipped one of the tubs of minnows over the side. The little silvery fish, still very much alive, made a cloud in the water. Hiroshi and Kenzo and Jiro dropped their long lines into the Pacific, lines full of gleaming barbless hooks that a hungry tuna might mistake for a minnow. Greed killed. Jiro understood that. The tuna didn’t, which let him make a living. He wondered if his sons did. Compared to him, they’d had things easy. How much good had that done them? Jiro only shrugged.

Hiroshi and Kenzo went back and forth, mostly in English, now and then in Japanese. Jiro caught names: Roosevelt, Hull, Kurusu. He hoped the Japanese special envoy would find a way to persuade America to start selling oil to Japan again. Cutting it off seemed monstrously unfair to him. He didn’t say that to his sons. They saw everything from the U.S. point of view. Arguing over politics was usually more trouble than it was worth.

What Jiro did say was, “Now!” He and his sons hauled the lines back aboard the Oshima Maru. A lot of them had small Hawaiian striped tuna, locally called aku, writhing on the hooks. They’d been after minnows and found something harder, something crueler. The three men worked like machines, gutting them and putting them on ice.