Her mom, Kasumi, had taught at a university and made pottery in her spare time. When Kaori had been a child, before the worst of the crowding in Tokyo, her mom had spent long evenings in a tiny bedroom turned art-studio in their apartment, before they’d had to rent it out. Bowls and mugs had bloomed out of piles of wet mud under her hands. She’d fire them, and when they were solid and beautiful, she’d drop them on the floor. From just high enough and with enough heft to splinter off a few shards that she’d lacquer back together with a mixture of epoxy and gold dust. They’re stronger, more beautiful for having been broken, her mom had told her.

Kaori had helped, sometimes, but she’d throw too hard. She’d pick her mom’s favorite pitchers and smash them to bits—bowls went bombs-away on the tile floors, her lips unmoving. She just wants to help you and doesn’t know what she’s doing. Give her a break, her dad, Yoshiki, had told her mom, and Kasumi had grumbled and swept the floors, still finding clay shards in corners of the house for days.

“Did you throw the clay pieces too hard on purpose?” I asked.

Kaori’s tiny smile told me all I needed to know. You bet your ass.

She’d wanted to punish them for the nightly injections of what they told her was medicine, for the meals delayed until she finished her hours of calculus. For forcing her to practice the shamisen because they didn’t want her to lose her heritage when Japan had been becoming more and more Western. She’d sit on her windowsill, plucking her shamisen and singing sakura, sakura with her thin voice, watching the kids run in the streets below. In the rare times they’d let her play on the weekends when she got a little older—social development is important, too, her mom had said—she’d dominated her friends in shoot-’em-up survival games with names like KarmaKiller. The VR-projections had filled the living room in her friend Makoto’s house, the edges of the arena looking sharp enough that they could cut glass. Kaori had always shimmied her avatar up to an arena catwalk and sniped everyone. At first, they’d high-fived her—another blam-o by Killer Kaori—cheering on her quick fingers and cool head. But she’d never eased up on them. Even as a kid, why would she let them win? Soon enough, they’d stopped inviting her.

“But who will take care of you?” her dad asked, one video call shortly before his death. And the silent question there, of course, had been when will you take care of us?