Out the window, on the street, a motorcycle blasts by so loudly that it momentarily cleanses me of thought. I close my eyes, feeling a deep sleepiness take over. Yuka’s voice penetrates my fuzzy awareness before sleep.

“Rose smart. She know my surprise. We go to Hiroshima.”

The shinkansen glides through a dark tunnel. The tunnel walls are illustrated with animated figures, so the movement of the train tricks everyone’s eyes into seeing a moving cartoon of a man flying an airplane over a flowery field.

“That’s beautiful,” I say.

“Ad for laxative,” she says, smiling at me.

I laugh. “Are you joking?”

“No.” She smiles.

I laugh again. We’ve laughed together a lot in the last week. It makes me realize how little I laugh with Rose. Serious Rose. And yet Yuka has a certain steadiness like Rose. She has spent five out of the last six evenings with me, always extracting herself from the bed at exactly midnight so she can catch the train back to Ueno, where she lives with her parents.

“Do you like living with your parents?” I ask.

“They are old, need care. I help. Some cook, some clean.”

“But they don’t mind when you stay out until after midnight, like you’ve been lately?”

“They do not talk that. We almost watch TV.”

“But they don’t try to control you?”

“Control?”

“Tell you what to do? They don’t try to tell you what to do?”

“Sometime advice. They like I work for bank. They like I vacation, like now. They have neighbor come over when vacation.”

“Your parents sound nice and understanding.”

“Yes.”

Yuka leans her head back and closes her eyes.

A woman sitting in the seat on the other side of the aisle wears a mini-skirt and those fashionable boots: Shiny. Stiff. Black. Thigh-high. They make her look like Gregor Samsa in transition to a cockroach.

Lunch on the shinkansen: hot dog buns stuffed with spaghetti and corn.

The train moves past skeletons of buildings. I can’t tell if the buildings are going up or coming down. Cranes that look like metal dinosaurs pierce the gray sky.

While Yuka sleeps, an ache creeps into my bones. I want to be home, cutting lilies from the garden to bring inside the house, working at my computer all afternoon, reading a novel in bed. I don’t want to be sitting on the fastest-moving train rushing toward a city my country once annihilated.