I thought this sort of magnificent tree-lined avenue could only be found in an oil painting hanging in some art museum. Without an emperor in a horse-drawn carriage, the scene didn’t look right somehow. The Mercedes Benz now driving between the trees looked as small as a toy. And because Germany no longer has an emperor, I wanted to ask these pale soldier-trees standing at attention who they were waiting for. In this emperorless age, only a dictator pretending to be some kind of famous celebrity would ride down this road in a convertible with the top down, waving to the people.

All the trees bent ever so slightly toward the center of the avenue, and a few were leaning so far over they seemed about to break in the middle. They reminded me of drunks standing by the side of the road, trying to keep from vomiting. If these plane trees threw up, greenish yellow gunk mixed with bits of undigested insect wings would glop down on the shiny black hood of the Mercedes Benz that just happened to be passing beneath them.

A father with hairy legs protruding from his shorts and his five- or six-year-old daughter, wearing a helmet and riding a miniature bicycle, hurried down the broad bicycle path between sidewalk and street. Every time her father looked back at her the girl threw her shoulders back and stuck out her chest. She was pedaling awfully fast for such a little girl. The pleats of her light blue cotton dress swam lightly around her thighs. Summer vacation. The moment the words came into my head, the sweltering heat of my memory pulled me back in time, reducing me to the size of an elementary school pupil. This was not Berlin, but the flower bed in that schoolyard in northern Tama on the outskirts of Tokyo. The sunflowers were a little taller than me, so I had to reach up to stick my fingernails between the closely gathered seeds to pull one out, and then I’d tuck it into the pocket of my shorts. Each time I put my hand in my pocket, the thread unraveling from the seam inside got tangled around the tips of my sweaty fingers. I planned to feed these sunflower seeds to my hamster when I got home, but sometimes I’d bite the edge of one with my back teeth to open it so I could chew on the slender, grayish bit inside. Once home, I heard the words “Anniversary of the War’s End” coming from the television. Though I had always thought I lived in peacetime, when I was born the war had only been over for fifteen years. What if I had been alive during the war—just the thought made me shiver. It wasn’t bombs I was afraid of, but the military police. “This government keeps fighting a war they know they can’t win—the people who are dying don’t mean any more to them than the logs burning in their fireplace,” someone might overhear me say in a coffee shop, and that night Nazi MPs would come to arrest me . . . but what’s this? . . . they have Japanese faces. Couldn’t be. This is Berlin, isn’t it? I’d thought this was a safety zone, but now I wasn’t sure; seeking solace in yellow I found a dandelion, but then the purple thistles around it started to gleam, burning with hostility. Realizing that I’d come to a full stop, I started walking again. One step into the latticelike pattern of the plane trees cast shadows on the ground and I felt the cool air; with the next step, the dry sunlight was burning my cheeks.