1957. In a Tiong Bahru HDB flat still

halfkampong, 16yearold Raju cuts his hair short

before dawn, his mother’s kueh lapis cooling on

the table — he’ll never eat it. His father, a

MalayMuslim conscript who vanished in Malaya ’45,

left no photo, only a rusted identity card

stamped with a Japanese officer’s seal. The

state now demands every boy born before ’41

register for National Service — but Raju’s birth

certificate lists him as “Sato Kenji,” a name he

never knew.

The switch happened when he touched the card in

the attic. That night, his reflection blinked

first.

By week three of Basic Training at Pasir Ris,

Raju walks like the dead man, speaks in clipped

Japanese phrases he never learned, flinches at

the smell of wet rice straw. His drill sergeant

calls him “Sato” — no one asks why. The rule

bites: any recruit who questions his assigned

identity is shipped to the Andaman penal colony,

erased from records. Raju swallows his mother’s

Singlish curses, learns to salute with his

father’s stiff wrist.

At night, he dreams of the 1942 evacuation — not

his memory, but the ghost’s. A child’s hand

slipping from a woman’s grip in Kampong Glam. A

bamboo flute buried under a rubber tree. He

wakes with salt on his lips, not sweat.

On the eve of his first leave, he sneaks into

the old Japanese cemetery at Bukit Timah. There,

beneath a mosscracked stone marked “Sato Kenji,

1923–1945,” he finds his own name carved beside

it — in Malay script, freshly dug.

The next morning, he reports sick. They send him

home. His mother doesn’t ask why he’s crying.

She gives him his father’s old sarong, the one

with the frayed hem.

He burns the identity card.

But when he looks in the mirror, his face is

still the soldier’s.

The state never corrected the record.

The ghost never left.

He wears it now — not as disguise, but as

inheritance.

At the hawker centre, old men call him “Kiam,”

the Hokkien name for the dead. He buys kaya

toast. Pays with coins he doesn’t remember

earning.

He will never join the army.

He will never be Raju again.

And that’s how the nation forgot its ghosts — by

making them wear its uniform, then calling them

loyal.