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One time his class went on a trip to see the East Gardens of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. While most of his classmates lay sprawled on the grass in sight of the Nijubashi bridge, tossing small pieces of rubbish at each other and talking loudly of new video games and the latest anime episodes, only occasionally pausing to draw a few lines in their sketch books, Kaname wandered away.

There was a place where the water curved, and a bare branch (for it was nearly winter) bent to almost touch it, its thin twigs spread wide like a hand begging for another hand to grasp it. Kaname knelt down there on the grass, his sketch book balanced on his knee, to sketch the branch and its reaching partner beneath the water.

He wasn't sure how long he knelt there, for no one would come to find him; long enough to fill a large page with sweeping pencil lines, his hand moving automatically with little intercession from his mind. This simple exercise, copying from nature, required little thought.

The air had been still when he sat down but presently a strong wind began to blow, swaying the high branches of the trees and shaking the few stubbornly clinging autumn leaves left loose to drift down and settle upon the water. He looked up, following the direction of the wind and, through trees swaying like a courtier's fan, caught a glimpse of the walls of Edo Castle.

This is an Emperor's garden. The thought came into his mind, unbidden, and why should it make the breath catch in his throat, make him want to start up and look widely around, as if in an Emperor's Garden there might be someone coming along a curving path, walking beneath bowing trees, who might fill and soothe the emptiness within him.

The Emperor of Japan is a figure head, an anachronism, murmured the the dry, cynical voice of his History teacher and he lowered his eyes, suddenly tight and painful, to the paper resting upon his knee. His hand moved numbly over the shadow he had drawn in the water beside the reaching, longing branch, a reflection that nothing was there to cast. There is an Emperor in that Palace a thought tried to whisper in his mind but it collapsed, unable to bear the weight it tried to answer, as if he had hurled himself at a paper wall. And with it the garden shivered and broke too, and all the world, becoming a mere collection of grass and trees and stones.

He pressed his face down against the flat pages of his sketchbook and shook with silent sobs, for his world was all reflections and pale shades from which reality fled; like water from between grasping fingers, or happiness from a reaching heart.