I.
Anyone who has heard a Japanese person singing a song with English lyrics will know that, while the words might lose definition or come out strangely, the feeling can be no less sharp.

When Ako Sawamura sang the Beatles classic "Eleanor Rigby," the tricky foreign lilt of the name came off the tongue more easily as "Ereno," and some verbs lost their present-tense "s"—picks, and waits, for instance—and what was more, she had never seen a Japanese translation of the lyric. But let me give you a better sense of what I mean.

Ako had shared a bedroom with her sister, Shizuko, until they were nine; now she was 15 and Shizuko was 17, and their small bedrooms shared a wall. Ako sang "Eleanor Rigby" at just past one in the morning, thinking she was alone, not loudly but softly. Next door, Shizuko was lying awake in her bed adjacent to the wall. She was a lazy, narrow-minded girl who didn't listen to much popular music, and had never heard "Eleanor" before; and although she understood English, she could barely catch enough of her sister's singing to know that it was English. But what came through the wall was an eerie drone that Shizuko understood perfectly. She rolled on her side, banged on the wall and shouted: "Urusai! Damattayo!" Roughly translated: "Loudmouth! Cut it out, will ya?"

The response was out of proportion to the annoyance, but that's how it was.

In order to afford the extra bedroom, Ako's father, a policeman, had moved the family into an apartment by the elevated railroad tracks. The window of Ako's bedroom opened several feet in the air above the back of a passing train, and if she looked out the window, it was like a river of steel.

Kenji Sawamura was a man past his prime who did the best he could, but he was the type to never insist that he was man past his prime doing the best he could. He tried to smile and put a good face on things. In fact, since that day he had never admitted, even to his wife, that the new apartment was in any way inferior to the old one. When the first bullet car roared past the windows, rattling some china in an open box, Sawamura had smiled and explained to his livid family that savages in the tropics, living next to enormous waterfalls, were no more aware of them than city dwellers noticed the sound of traffic. His wife said nothing; Shizuko slammed the door to her room, called up her best friend, and started to complain about her lamebrain father. Only Ako understood the truth about Sawamura—that he was too proud to admit to even a partial mistake—but she also knew that it wouldn't do any good to reassure him. If she had hugged him around the waist, and lied to him that she liked the new apartment very much, he would have cheerily snapped, "Of course you do!"—or some such thing. Sawamura was a man who believed in himself.

And he was right. After several years of living in the railside apartment, Ako no longer took much notice of the trains. When the rattling started, and pale, white light swamped her room, washing over the bedsheets and up the walls, it seemed like a natural—even fitting—punctuation of her thoughts. It wasn't the only thing she got used to: She didn't even hear her sister talking loudly on the phone well into the night anymore.

Shizuko disliked most things, but she disliked Ako in particular. She disliked Ako's music, Ako's uncertain half smile, and especially the fact that Ako was thin. Not that she was particularly fat herself, but as she always complained: "We eat the exact same stuff!"

It was true. They did.

II.
Not long after the move, something unfortunate had happened to Kenji Sawamura: His close friend, an Osakaan named Morita, died. Although Morita was also a policeman, in what was by Japanese standards a fairly seedy neighborhood, he didn't die in the line of duty but from asphyxiation in a house fire. He had been an inveterate smoker indoors and out, and everyone assumed, though nobody said, that he had been responsible for the fire himself. Everyone commiserated. But because Morita's death had lacked that certain heroic quality, it left Sawamura with a bad taste in his mouth. It wasn't right. He was sad that his friend was dead, and that he would never hear his deep smoker's cough again; but he was almost angry with him, that he had chosen this way to leave the world.

After the incident, Sawamura talked less. He was assigned a night shift; he told his wife, with his habitual self-confidence, that he'd done his best to plead his case, but that, after all, someone had to do the work. As usual, he almost seemed to believe his own lie. But Ako, listening through a gap in her bedroom door, suspected the truth: that, on the contrary, he had begged to be assigned the night shift.