Burnt Shadows

Part 4 opens in New York City in the year 2001, just three months after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. Kim Burton, now in her mid-thirties, visits her grandmother, Ilse Weiss, at her apartment close to Ground Zero. Kim is moving back to New York after working as an engineer in Seattle. Kim smokes a cigarette, thinking briefly of her disapproving grandfather—James Burton, now deceased—and his disdain for Americans and modernity in general.

Kim tells Hiroko, now in her late seventies, that she plans to stay through the holidays to avoid awkwardness with the boyfriend she left behind in Seattle. Hiroko teases Kim for being a bad communicator and asks Kim what is going on in the world. Kim tells Hiroko that the last fires from September 11 are going out, and Hiroko offends her by replying, “That’s not the world, it’s just the neighborhood” (254). Ilse, now 91 years old, enters and explains to Kim that, to Hiroko, the scene at Ground Zero is less frightening than the current nuclear tensions between Pakistan and India. Hiroko asks Ilse if she has heard from Harry. Harry and Raza now work together in covert operations for a private military company, but Ilse and Kim maintain the cover story for Hiroko that Harry and Raza work in “the administrative side of private security” in Miami (256).