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rations to trade for their silver rice.
    Shin sneered. “I bet you want to join my gang now, don’t you? Not so high and mighty now, are you? Well, it just so happens that you can’t. Not unless I say so.”
    â€œYour gang?” I said. “How long have you been in charge?”
    He frowned, counting on his fingers. “Ever since—” Every­one went quiet. Ever since March, he meant. The night when Tokyo had burned.
    â€œYou must be making pots of money, I suppose?”
    He waved a hand at the departing jeep.
    â€œWe can always scrounge from the yankiis!”
    The children giggled. They were filthy and crusted with dirt. Their shirts were just rags, their hair matted. They would never last another month with Shin in charge, I thought.
    â€œDo you really think they’ll always be this generous? What about when winter comes? It’s October already. Chewing gum won’t be much use then!”
    Shin gave another moronic grin and shrugged.
    The children looked up at me nervously.
    â€œListen,” I said. “Here’s what we can do.”
    Later that night, Shin and Nobu and I loitered for a few hours outside the Continental Hotel, where the American officers were billeted. We collected a big pile of butts from the ash cans, and back at the station, Koji ground them up in his prize shell casing—a real beauty from a Type 89 discharger. We rolled new smokes from licked twists of newspaper, and the next morning, Aiko took them around the station to sell. When she got back, we had enough money to buy three whole seaweed-wrapped rice balls. We stuffed them into our mouths on the spot—grinning at each other, flecks of rice stuck to our chins.
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    I never learned exactly what had happened to Koji, Aiko, Nobu and Shin on the night of the raid back in March. It somehow became one of the rules, early on, that we were never allowed to talk about such things. I was still so ashamed of myself that I could hardly bear to even think about that night. The whole city had been on fire as I’d sprinted back toward our house, leaving Satsuko alone in the dark water of the canal. I only made it a dozen yards before the cotton quilt of my air defence cowl caught on fire. I screamed as I tried to pull it off, but it stuck to my cheeks, and there was a smell like roasting pork, which I grasped must be my skin burning. I staggered into a pit shelter by the side of the road, and sat there all night long, the ground vibrating beneath my feet, the air filled with sirens and planes and the stink of smoke as I sobbed in the darkness.
    By the time the fires had burned out, my face was already blistering. I stumbled back up the charred street to the Yoshiwara canal, to the iron ladder where I’d left Satsuko the night before. The water below was full of floating corpses, drowned or asphyxiated, bobbing in the water amongst the blackened chunks of sodden timber.
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    It was good not to be on my own anymore. I missed my family more than I cared to admit, and I didn’t know what I would have done without the company of the other children. It felt almost like a big game sometimes, as if we’d all run away from school together. We lit refuse fires in the Plaza and danced around in GI hats made out of folded newspapers. We played destroyer-torpedo in the broken-down houses and built forts in the bomb craters from charred planks and twisted strands of metal. We even marked out a baseball pitch in the wasteground at the back of the station, where we held tournaments with the other gangs, gambling for bullet casings and bomb fragments.
    What a liberation from the war! Those days of writing comfort letters to the soldiers until your fingers cramped up, marching around the playground singing patriotic songs.
Children of the Emperor!
    But the children still cried out at night, at the station. I’d wake to see their little faces glistening with tears. So I made it another rule that