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there, stunned for a moment. Then, from nowhere, another cocky boy jumped in and scrabbled for the cigarette himself.
    â€œGet off!” I shouted, grabbing him. “This is my patch!” I twisted the boy’s arm, and we grappled and thrashed together on the ground. Above us, the laughing sailors goaded us on, ducking and weaving behind their giant ebony fists.
    My hand gripped the boy’s throat as I pinned him to the ground. But then, as I slapped his terrified face, I got a shock. It was Koji, the grandson of Mrs. Oka the pickle seller—he’d lived right next door to us in Asakusa.
    â€œKoji?” I said, letting go of his neck. “Is that really you?”
    Koji nodded, wiping away snot and tears with dirty little fists.
    â€œDon’t you remember me?” I asked.
    He grimaced. “What happened to your face?”
    The thick welts on my cheeks had gone hard now, like the rubber on bicycle tires.
    â€œI got burned.”
    His eyes grew wide. “You look creepy!”
    I shrugged. “What happened to your granny?”
    He thrust out his bottom lip.
    â€œOh. I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”
    He shook his head sulkily.
    â€œHungry?”
    â€œStarving to death!”
    Over at one of the busy wooden stalls in the market, I counted out a few copper coins from my pocket. We had just enough to share a bowl of cold noodles, and as we stuffed them into our mouths, he told me about some other kids he’d come across since the war had ended. There were quite a few of us Asakusa lot around, it seemed, all in the same boat.
    â€œNobu’s here,” he said.
    â€œReally?”
    He nodded. Nobu was a ten-year-old boy from the Senso school—his dad had run the fishmonger on the corner of Umamichi Street, where my own father had bought eels for our shop.
    â€œLittle Aiko-chan, too.” Aiko was Nobu’s little sister, I remem­bered, a funny smudge of a girl who’d attended the elementary school on the corner.
    Koji glanced around and lowered his voice.
    â€œShin’s here, too,” he murmured. “You know, the boy from Fuji High School?”
    I groaned. “Trust him to be here!”
    I knew Shin alright. A local bully with a square jaw, he’d been one of the tenement gang up near Sengen Shrine. His father had been a fireman, covered in tattoos, who’d lived on a barge on the Okawa, and my mother said he’d sold Shin’s sister Midori, one of the neighbourhood beauties, to the Willow Tree teahouse to become a trainee geisha when she was just eleven years old. Shin had taken after his dad, though—always fighting dirty in the battles we waged in the back streets, throwing chunks of glass on the sly and striding around in a pair of rolled up khaki trousers he swore he’d taken off the body of a crash-landed American pilot.
    Over by the Ueno Plaza steps, children were shrieking like monkeys as a pair of GIs revved the engine of their jeep. They clutched at their sleeves, grabbing for the packets of caramels the soldiers tossed out to them. I spotted Shin straight away. He was nearly as tall as me now, and wore no sandals or shirt, just his torn old pair of khakis. As the jeep spun off, he sprinted after it and leaped up onto the bumper. He clung on and rode along the avenue for a second before toppling off and tumbling into the dirt. With an idiotic grin, he picked himself up and hobbled back toward us, elbows streaked with blood.
    He grimaced when he saw me. “What does he want? He’s even uglier than before.”
    I gave him a withering look.
    Scabs covered his knees and his front teeth were broken. I remembered how, after our schools had been evacuated to the countryside, us Asakusa lot had been given all the heavy jobs in the village, digging octopus holes and cutting fodder for the local garrison’s horses. Shin, meanwhile, had wormed his way in with the straw-sandaled village boys by pilfering our barley