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the guest of honor that evening, and they were talking excitedly. Mikhail Andreievitch Yegorov spoke French fluently with a wonderful Russian accent that sounded like music. He was telling Papa a strange story about an island he called the Devil’s Island. It sounded fascinating. Charlotte decided to let good manners go take a flying leap and went over to join them.

    His mother hadn’t said a word all day, but nevertheless Hiroshi had noticed something was wrong. It wasn’t hard to guess it had something to do with what had happened that morning at the embassy. She finally came out with it at suppertime. She said he should leave that girl alone; nothing good could come of it. Said they were rich folk, and h e ’ d best keep his distance from rich folk.
    “But why?” asked Hiroshi.
    His mother didn’t look at him. She gazed into empty space, seeming to see something else, something he knew nothing about. Nothing good, that was for sure.
    “We’re nothing to them,” she said bitterly at last. “People like us aren’t important to them. They don’t have to care how we feel, so they don’t.”
    Hiroshi thought about this and then about what it had been like to spend time with the girl today. Charlotte. Without making a sound, he practiced the r and l with his mouth.
    “I thought she was nice,” was all he said.
    His mother looked at him, stared at him for a long time as though he were a stranger, and finally said, “You’ll see soon enough what that can lead to. Believe you me.”

    The Russian ambassador broke off his story when Charlotte approached, bowed to her with a broad, cheerful grin, and said, “Ah, the young lady is doing us quite an honor. MademoiselleCharlotte!”
    She liked how he said Charlotte, rolling his r ’s in that Russian way. “I hope I’m not intruding,” she said politely, the way her mother had told her a lady should.
    Yegorov straightened up and laughed out loud. “No,” he said. “No, you are not intruding. Quite the opposite. Now tell me, how do you like Japan?”
    “Very much,” Charlotte said. Of course, she could have complained that apart from a few streets around the embassy and some shopping malls, she had hardly seen any of Japan and so she couldn’t really say much about it, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you said at a reception, where everybody was on their best behavior and just said nice things to one another. That was the art of diplomacy. So she continued, “We’re going to a museum soon; it’s called the Island of the Saints. I’m looking forward to it a great deal. It’s bound to be interesting.”
    The Russian raised his bushy eyebrows. “Really? How nice. Although I must confess I’ve never heard of that museum.”
    “It’s not actually a museum as such,” Papa explained offhandedly. “It’s a Shinto shrine to the north of Tokyo that is open to visitors once a month. The island itself is just a tiny little place in the middle of an artificial lake, not much bigger than a tabletop. But it’s said to be very pretty. Typically Japanese.”
    “You learn something new every day,” Yegorov declared. “And I thought that I’d read my city guide quite thoroughly.”
    Papa smiled indulgently. “You really mustn’t blame yourself, Mikhail Andreievitch. I would imagine most Japanese have never heard of it either. Charlotte’s nanny is from that area, which is how we learned of it. It’s called Seito-Jinjiya.”
    “The word jinjiya means shrine, and seito means Holy Island or Island of the Saints,” Charlotte explained.
    “Well, well.” Yegorov nodded in approval. “And what is there to see?”
    “Old things!” squealed Charlotte. The next moment, she held her breath, shocked at her own enthusiasm. She mustn’t get carried away. That wasn’t how a lady behaved.
    “Old things? You like those?”
    “Oh yes, very much.”
    “The shrine,” Papa added, “is said to hold some relics that are supposedly among the oldest in Japan,