As he smiled at me in his simple way I felt an uneasy sense of pride. Despite myself, I admired this Japanese soldier, with his swollen temples and bruised face. He was no more than a labourer, but in his way he had risen to the challenge of the war. His heavy shoulders, marked by patches of eczema and scores of flea bites, were bursting through the fabric of his shirt, his chest restrained like an animal by the canvas webbing. He was one of the few strong men I had met, completely unlike the officers in the British forces and most of the adults in Lunghua. Only Mariner and the Ralston brothers would have been a match for this Japanese warrior.

I finished the potato and wiped my fingers on my lips, watching the sweat running from his neck into the hollows of his collarbones. I wished that I had learned enough Japanese from Private Kimura to explain that the war was over. The Chinese prisoner on the platform was now scarcely able to breathe, his ribs crushed by the coils of telephone wire. Bruises filled with congested blood stared from his forehead. Tired by the effort of knotting the heavy wire, the corporal tossed the cable onto the concrete floor and strolled stiffly along the platform.

The private’s fingers flicked at his lips, tapping a message to himself. He grimaced over some memory bothering him like a mosquito. Deciding to take the risk, I slid my clasp knife from my hip pocket. With the blade closed, I offered it to the private, hoping that he would want to test the blade, and might cut the telephone wire binding the Chinese prisoner.

But the blade was of no interest to him. He cut away a canvas flap that hung from his ragged boot and turned his attention to the clasp. He smiled at the cowboy motif carved into the mother-of-pearl handle. His thick fingers traced out the ranchhand in Stetson and high-heeled boots, and the twirling lasso that resembled the telephone wire he had been coiling at his feet.

The railway lines hummed in the heat, a sound like pain. The Chinese slumped against the pole, his neck so flushed that it was almost blue. He raised his head and looked at me in a fevered way, as if we were fellow passengers who had missed our connection. He was four or five years older than I was, his hair cut neatly in a way that Mrs. Dwight had always urged on me. Was he a Kuomintang agent, one of the thousands in Shanghai, or an office clerk working for the Japanese occupation authority who had fallen foul of the kempetai?