Stewart Parker
Two women navigate the challenges of life on a wintry day in 1980s Belfast. While Ruby has a cold and gets caught in the rain, Iris is job-hunting but feels lost in the traffic.
On August the 15th, 1945, after the official surrender of the Empire of Japan, Admiral Matome Ugaki led the last Special Attack Force pilots across the Pacific, to crash into American ships. Thirty-five years later, the men who serviced the aeroplanes are still meeting up for their annual dinner. Now settled into civilian jobs - dentist, baker, taxi-driver, insurance salesman - and with children and grandchildren, they bemoan the decay of traditional Japanese values. Hard liquor is imbibed, toasts raised to the memory of the heroic dead, and old rivalries resurface. The survivors' dissatisfaction with post-war life comes to a head when, in a moment of drunken inspiration, Tokkotai the airline pilot decides on a symbolic gesture to show that the kamikaze spirit lives on.
Roy and Martyn want to write the next Irish winner for the Eurovision Song Contest. So who thinks they are working for British Army Intelligence? And why has someone sent them two bullets through the post?
