The luck that comes from far beyond the stars

The luck that comes from far beyond the stars is a recurring expression for the chance that cryptanalysis demands but no amount of training, experience, or genius can guarantee. At Unit 701, it gives a name to what cannot be scheduled or explained—and, in Rong Jinzhen’s case, to the startling reversal by which a man others underestimate accomplishes what they thought beyond him.

Meaning and Ritual

The phrase begins as part of the unit’s lore about the lonely, difficult work of decrypting ciphers. People there say that the necessary luck can be caught, but only through an almost impossible ritual: raising one’s hands high every morning and evening at exactly the moment black smoke curls from one’s ancestors’ tombs. The image makes luck seem at once cosmic and ritualized, something beyond human command that people nevertheless try to summon through exact timing.

The expression does not mean that skill is irrelevant. The account places luck alongside training, experience, and genius, as an additional requirement of a profession in which even great ability may not be enough. Its extravagant, ancestral imagery gives form to cryptanalysis’s uncertainty: effort can be made, but success still depends on an arrival no practitioner can compel.

A Judgment Reversed

Before Rong Jinzhen’s breakthrough, the phrase helps frame the doubts of his colleagues. His work seems unpromising to people at Unit 701, who see a solitary man reading books unrelated to his assignment and show little confidence in either his intelligence or his interest in the job. The deputy division chief’s contemptuous comparison of him to an ugly toad reflects a judgment shared more widely in the cryptography unit: Rong appears to possess neither the natural ability nor the luck the work requires.

The turn comes when Rong decrypts PURPLE. By the winter of 1957, he has spent just over a year at Unit 701, and the achievement overturns the assumptions attached to the phrase. The supposed lack of promise has concealed a genius with extraordinary fortune; the language of luck, once used to describe what Rong seemed to lack, now marks the scale of his success.

The Unexplained Breakthrough

The account intensifies the mystery by offering several incompatible explanations for how Rong solved PURPLE. Some people say he decrypted it in his sleep, perhaps after interpreting someone else’s dream; others attribute his inspiration to chess games with a man they call the lunatic, or to a novel he was reading. The narrative does not settle among these possibilities. The breakthrough is certain; its route remains obscure.

That uncertainty preserves the phrase’s double force. It may describe a stroke of fortune, but it also captures the inability of onlookers to see how Rong’s mind arrives at a result. Colleagues become excited, while experts sent by Headquarters feel jealous: they had expected Liseiwicz’s pointers to make them the ones who would decrypt PURPLE. The phrase thus names not only a suspected ingredient of success, but the gap between visible effort, hidden thought, and the outcome that finally changes how a person is judged.