Tokyo Ueno Station

Suddenly, Kazu finds himself enveloped by silence. All the noise has stopped. He is standing outside the Ueno Royal Art Museum looking at a print of a rose by the French painter Redouté. Kazu then hears two women speaking to each other, both in their sixties. The two women are so absorbed in their conversation that they do not take notice of the paintings of the roses that are on display outside the museum; their dialogue is interspersed with descriptions of the flowers. It is insinuated in the conversation that one of the women is having an affair. Seeing the roses brings to mind another memory for Kazu, this one involving a trip to a cabaret in the red-light district, roughly three years after Koichi’s death.

As he is sniffing a rose that had been in a vase at his table, he is approached by the hostess, a woman named Junko. After speaking with her and learning that she is also from Fukushima, Kazu slow dances with her. Kazu confesses that this was his dream girl, but he never crossed any boundaries with her, never took her on a date, and was always just a regular customer at her bar—nothing more than that.