Darrell Houston

He has a Japanese name, but nobody knows or cares what it is. His friends know him simply as Glue Boy. He never knew his father, an American Negro soldier long since returned to the States. His mother, a Japanese farm girl who came to Tokyo after the war and ended up selling her favors to American GIs to keep from starving to death, somehow managed to keep her ainoko (literally, love baby) with her. For nearly three years she kept Glue Boy hidden in her four-tatami mat-floored room while she worked in various bars in Shibuya, one of Tokyo’s more popular entertainment districts. Being the mother of a love baby was a deep shame in postwar Japan, of course; but to have a half-black child in the most race conscious of nations was a double stigma. Glue Boy’s dusky skin and kinky hair were his irrefutable badges of illegitimacy. Desperate and disowned by her family, the mother dyed her little son’s curls a hideous orange-red in the hope that her countrymen would take her