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and I loitered for a few hours outside the Continental Hotel, where the American officers were billeted, and collected a pile of butts from the ash cans. Back at the station, Koji ground them up in his prize shell casing — a real beauty from a Type 89 discharger — and together, we rolled the new smokes into licked twists of newspaper. Aiko took them around the station the next morning. When she got back, I realized 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 with flecks of rice stuck to our chins.
    â€œIt’s good that we’re all back together, now, isn’t it?” Koji remarked one evening. We were sitting up in Ueno Plaza, where some other kids had lit a refuse fire. Koji had just been showing off, a newspaper hat on his head, staggering around like a drunk GI, with Aiko pretending to be his giggling Japanese girlfriend.
    It was true. It was a real relief not to be on my own any more. I missed my mother and father and sister more than I cared to let on, and I don’t think that I could have survived without the company of the other children. It almost seemed like a big game sometimes, as if we’d all run off on holiday together. We played destroyer-torpedo in the broken-down houses, built forts in the bomb craters from charred planks and twisted bits of metal. We’d even made 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, marching up and down the playground, shouting songs. Children of the Emperor!
    I never discovered exactly what had happened to Koji, Aiko, Shin and Nobu on the night of the fire raid back in March. It became a rule, early on, that we weren’t ever to talk about it. I was still so ashamed of myself that I could hardly bear to 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’d only made it a few dozen yards before the cotton quilt of my air defence cowl caught on fire. I screamed as I tried to pull it off, my skin smelling like roasting pork. I staggered into a pit shelter by the side of the road, where I sat all night long, the ground vibrating beneath my feet, surrounded by the sounds of 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 Satstuko 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.
    The children sometimes cried out at night, at the station. I’d wake to see their faces glistening with tears. But it became another rule that you couldn’t let anyone see you cry. If you did, the others had to sit on you, as if you were a sack of rice. I thought that if anyone were to start crying, then someone else would follow, and soon enough, we’d all be crying our eyes out and no one would be able to stop. We might go on crying forever, I thought, until we ended up like empty cicada shells, having cried ourselves away entirely.
    ~ ~ ~
    I was playing with my metal soldiers one morning when Aiko bustled over to me. She hovered in front of me for a few minutes until, finally, I asked her what was the matter.
    She frowned.
    â€œCan people live in holes?” she asked.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I said.
    Shyly, she told me that she had met a teenage girl the day before, who was living in a hole outside the station.
    â€œYou mean the slit bomb shelter?”
    There were plenty of single-person earthwork shelters scattered across the city,