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chestnuts wrapped in a cloth. “My hero,” Oharu would say and kiss his cheek. He saw more sparks down the street and thought that another chestnut cart lay ahead until he heard the singsong Klaxon of a fire engine.
    The fire was down a side street at a tailor’s shop; Harry knew the place, which was near the garage where he kept his car. He had often seen the tailor and his wife, a grandmother, a girl and her younger brother eating dinner in the room behind, the tailor’s eye on the open shop door and any possible trade that might be lured by his window display of the cheapest cotton, rayon and sufu. The house was old, built of wood frame with a bamboo front, the typical tinderbox Japanese lived in. The fire was already in full throat, an oven roar accompanied by exploding glass and the excited whoosh of paper screens. The crowd inched close, in awe of how a hovel’s straw, books, bedding, needles and thread could transcend themselves into such a beautiful tower of flame, the sort of fireworks that spread, rose and blossomed a second time into a glowing maelstrom. The way Eskimos had words for different kinds of snow, the Japanese had words for fire: deliberate, accidental, initial flame, approaching blaze, invading, spreading, overwhelming fire. Harry found himself next to the tailor, who was explaining through his tears and with many apologies how the girl had left her homework on a space heater. The paper had caught fire and fallen and lit a mat, then a screen and scraps of rayon that lit as fast as candlewicks. Sufu was worse. It was a new wartime material, ersatz cloth made of wood fibers, basically cellulose that disintegrated after three or four washings but burned like hell. One minute, the tailor said, one minute the family was out of the room, and then it was too late. Harry saw the wife and children, everyone painted orange and black in the fire’s glow. Two Red Cross workers bore off the grandmother on a litter. Air-raid drills were all the fashion. Well, this was more like the real thing.
    A pumper arrived with a company of firemen. In helmets of lacquered leather with paneled neck protectors they looked like samurai in armor launching a siege. They hosed one another until their jackets of heavy cotton were soaked. One man climbed with a hose to the top of a tall ladder that was supported by nothing but the strong arms of his companions. Other firemen swung stout poles with metal scythes to tear down not only the burning house but also the tattoo shop and eel grill on either side. No one protested, not in a city where sparks swarmed over the rooftops like visible contagion and a hundred thousand could die in a single blaze. A second wall peeled off, revealing a tailor’s dummy trapped by flames. Screens burned from the center, stairs step by step. Hell, Harry thought, why not just build the whole damn thing of matches? Smoke swirled like cannon fire, and all the windows of the street lit, as if each house yearned to join in. The firemen regrouped, their jackets steaming. Firemen had a special incentive in leveling whole neighborhoods, since their second occupation was construction. What they tore down, they rebuilt. Not a bad racket, it seemed to Harry. However, there was more than money in such a drama of smoke and flames. It sometimes struck him that there was in the Japanese a majestic perversity that made them build for fire, leaving open the chance that at any time they could be wiped from the map just so they could start from scratch again.
    But the tailor was defeated. He sank to the ground, a man who would hang himself if he had a rafter and a rope, his eyes dazed by the light that was consuming his life’s possessions, as if he had been displaced from his home by a visiting dragon. He looked vaguely in the direction of the ambulance siren and returned his stupefied gaze to his daughter, the girl who had left her homework on the heater. She was a plump girl who looked like she wished she were