“Fight poison with poison”

“Fight poison with poison” is the maxim at the heart of Two Poisons: a defense of doing what circumstances demand, and a warning that the means of resistance can damage the person who chooses them. Jake Adelstein accepts the maxim as a description of his work, but his retrospective account refuses to make that acceptance an uncomplicated victory.

The Maxim and Its Exchange

The phrase emerges as a conversational exchange rather than a principle Jake announces on his own. His companion begins, “Well, Jake, sometimes, you know, you have to fight poison—”; the reply completes the thought, “—with poison. I’m familiar with the proverb.” The interruption makes the maxim sound already known to Jake, not a newly discovered rule. What follows turns the proverb from a familiar saying into a practical justification: the companion argues that the job must be done by whatever means are necessary and that the result is what matters at the end of the day.

Jake answers that he understands. The response does not establish that he regards every method as acceptable; it shows that he recognizes the reasoning and the personal risk behind it. In his assessment, the speaker is unlike Sekiguchi, yet wise in a different way: perhaps not a good cop, but a good person and a good friend. That distinction complicates the maxim. The speaker’s value to Jake does not rest on professional virtue alone, but on judgment, friendship, and a willingness to act when Jake needs support.

Practical Necessity and Loyalty

Jake identifies a concrete cost to that support: his friend is putting his career on the line and breaking the blue wall of silence for him. The image of a wall gives the exchange an institutional dimension. The friend’s assistance is not merely private reassurance; it crosses a boundary that ordinarily protects police silence. In this setting, fighting poison with poison means using a compromised route to pursue a result that Jake considers necessary, while another person accepts professional danger to help him.

That help also unsettles Jake’s sense of what he deserves. He is unsure whether he merits such benevolence, but grateful to receive it. The maxim therefore operates through a relationship, not just as an abstract rule about tactics. Jake depends on someone who is taking a real career risk; gratitude and doubt accompany the practical aid. The scene does not resolve the moral problem by declaring the method clean. Instead, loyalty makes the choice understandable while leaving its cost visible.

The Cost of the Method

The chapter’s title, Two Poisons, gives the proverb a double edge. In his later reckoning, Jake writes that he “fought poison with poison and probably poisoned myself in the process.” The repetition changes the maxim’s emphasis: poison is at once what he opposes and what he takes into himself by opposing it in this way. He says he began as a pawn, played the game as well as he could, protected his people, and did his job. He calls that a kind of victory, but qualifies the triumph rather than presenting it as moral vindication.

That qualification is sharpened by his uncertainty about the person he became. Jake says he knows he started out as one of the good guys, but is not sure he ended that way. The maxim thus explains his choices without erasing their consequences. Its logic is instrumental—do what is required to get the job done—but its retrospective meaning is personal: the job may be accomplished while the person doing it is altered. The phrase offers no assurance that the poison can be used without being absorbed.

Retrospective Moral Ambivalence

Jake’s final reflections resist a simple division between good and evil. He notes that he and Tadamasa Goto were both amateur Buddhists, while acknowledging that Goto’s reasons may have been expedient or may have reflected a guilty conscience. Jake does not claim certainty about the other man’s repentance. Nor does he present himself as a moral judge untouched by his own methods: his account of fighting poison is already an admission of possible self-poisoning.

He reads Buddhist sutras without converting and says he does not believe in karma or reincarnation, although he would like to believe that evil is punished, good rewarded, love overcomes hatred, and truth defeats lies. His stated hopes collide with his observation that the world does not reliably work that way. Against that gap between moral desire and observed reality, “Fight poison with poison” is neither a clean endorsement nor a repudiation. It is the compromised rule Jake believes enabled him to protect his people and do his work—and the phrase through which he acknowledges that the means may have left their mark on him.