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faint drops of red-brown. Could they be blood? Spooked,I quickly refolded it and put it back in the envelope, back in the box.
    M ONTHS LATER, AFTER we finally sold the condo, I brought the ammo box and its contents home to my apartment. The letters, by their sheer quantity, were intimidating. They lay in their inelegant sarcophagus like a reproach. The abundance of them was alarming. When I occasionally plucked one out to read, it always had the same effect, detonating a landmine of longing for my father. The flag remained in its manila envelope buried under the piles of correspondence, too disturbing to contemplate.
    However, as time wore on, a shift occurred. The contents of the metal box, which had initially frightened me, now began to draw me in. At odd moments, I’d pull the box out from the closet and read a few letters. I noted a cast of characters—“Dr. Orange,” Hal Rubin, Morrie Franklin, someone named Sam Wengrow. Who were they? I began to realize that the metal box contained a story, many stories. Tales of fear, bravery, and kindness, the mundane and the heroic intertwined.
    I’d take out the flag and examine it, running my hands gently over its shimmery surface, folding it up and placing it back in its envelope. For months it didn’t occur to me that the Japanese characters actually meant anything. They were just mute forms, swirling across the surface of the silk.
    One day, on a seemingly mindless impulse, I searched through my Rolodex at work. My job then was at an underfunded city arts center, coordinating theater and dance programs. I found the telephone number of a Japanese performance artist named Rika Ohara.
    I didn’t explain to Rika why I needed to see her, but she agreed to come to my office anyway. She was a striking young woman. Her head was shaved, and her delicate features were not disguised by the loose-fitting slacks and oversized flannel shirt she wore. Herthumb and forefinger were stained tobacco-yellow. She was one of the few who still rolled her own smokes.
    We sat outside on a bench, shaded from the sweltering sun. I opened the envelope and gently pulled out the flag. “I found this with my father’s things after he died,” I said. “He fought in the Philippines. He must have found this on a battlefield.” She looked at the flag but didn’t say a word. “I’d like to know what these characters mean,” I said. She listened but she didn’t answer right away.
    I sat holding the flag on my lap as Rika plucked tobacco from a tin and placed it precisely on the crease of a cigarette paper. She daintily moistened the gummed edge, then formed it quickly into a smoke. She placed it in her mouth and lit up. Then she glanced up from her task and took the flag from me in her small fine hands.
    She looked at it silently for what seemed like a long time. Whatever she was thinking, she didn’t let on. Perhaps I should defend my interest in this ghoulish artifact, I thought. I didn’t know how my father had come to have the flag. I refused to assume the obvious: that he’d taken it off a dead soldier. Yet I felt a rush of shame.
    Finally, her fingertips still caressing the flag as if she were reading Braille, Rika turned to me and said, “This is a good-luck banner, given to a Japanese soldier when he goes into battle. Perhaps when he leaves for duty overseas. It says here: ‘To Yoshio Shimizu given to him in the Greater East Asia War—to be fought to the end. If you believe in it, you win.’ That’s what it says. The other characters on the flag are names.” She gingerly handed the flag back to me. Her cigarette had gone out. She calmly lit up.
    I wanted to ask my father about the flag, about Yoshio Shimizu. Norman Steinman didn’t know his enemy had a name. And, I was pretty sure, he wouldn’t have wanted to know.

C HAPTER T HREE

Into the Deep
    A MONG THE MEMENTOS I found with my father’s