Crouching down, he ran his fingers through the rich volcanic soil. Compared to its blackness, his fingers looked almost as white as the daikon themselves, but he knew their pallor would fade as the harvest progressed. The dark soil would gradually become deeply ingrained in his skin, and once the harvest was complete, it would take several weeks for his hands to return to their original colour. Taking a deep breath, he stretched his hamstrings one last time before reaching down for his first daikon of the day. Brushing some of the soil from its top and gripping it firmly by both its body and the bushy leaves, he pulled hard. There was a moment of resistance before it came free with a dull but satisfying snap as the tap root detached from the rest of its underground structure. Holding it up for inspection, he could smell the moist earth and feel the coolness of its flesh. It was a well-sized specimen for a Sakurajima radish, creamy white in colour, about 30 centimetres long, and weighing about a kilogram.

‘Only another ten thousand to go, Mikio,’ he muttered to himself as he dropped it into the barrow.

In his peripheral vision, a couple of hundred metres away, his parents were hard at work near the small wooden fence that separated their farm from the next. They’d waved briefly a few minutes ago when he’d left the minka and joined them in the field, but were now fully focused on their own work again. Even from here, he could see that their barrows were already nearly full. The four-hectare harvest would take them seven dawn-to-dusk days and hundreds of trips to the barn. With each trip, their barrows groaned under the weight of the daikon. The radishes would then be stored until they were either sold, picked, or dried.

The unusual spiky fronds of the next daikon’s foliage didn’t register with him, and he pulled it from the ground like all the rest.

Red.

Like the potatoes he’d seen at the market, the ones his mother never bought, its body was a solid, deep red. He stared at the radish for a moment before throwing it into the barrow anyway. He assumed a rogue seed had found its way into the sack his father had bought for sowing.

Behind them all, Mount Sakurajima loomed, its snow-covered vents releasing faint wisps of vapour. It was a presence never far from the minds of the island’s inhabitants. The mountain had given the area its rich soil and difficult past.