“They’re awfully expensive,” I said. “Hang on a minute, there’s some important information on the back of the box.” To buy some time, I started to read. You want everything in your life to be 100% natural. But you still want the fish sticks you loved as a child, and you want your children to enjoy them too. These fish sticks are the creation of a young man who, with this very dream in his heart, rented a section of the Mekong River, where for twenty years he organically raised Mekong giant catfish, which he fried in flour made from wheat grown with absolutely no fertilizers or chemical additives. Strangely enough, as I read I started to feel that these fish sticks were truly a work of art, so even at this price they might be worth it.

“Come on, buy me some.”

“They cost an awful lot, don’t you think? After all, they’re just fish sticks.”

“But you’ve got money, don’t you?”

“I’m not rich, you know—not at all.”

“But you’ve got enough with you now, so why keep looking for something cheaper?”

What a cheeky ghost. I saw something round and yellow reflected in the glass. Taking a closer look, I saw it was a melon. The green was zucchini, and the white was the sweater worn by the woman who stood beside the melon, staring at it. The glass didn’t reflect anything that was too small or not brightly colored. Wondering if I could see myself, I tried standing on tiptoe and leaning over to one side. I’d heard that ghosts are not reflected in mirrors, but what about someone shopping with a ghost?

I was thinking up excuses in case the ghost asked me to buy him a melon, but he wasn’t interested. Perhaps there weren’t any melons in Berlin a hundred years ago. Since this area was East Germany, you probably couldn’t even have bought bananas here until 1989. Yet now it looked like a painting of the tropics, with colorful oranges, grapefruits, lemons, persimmons, kumquats, and pineapples, all in a row. With orchards on the other side of the globe being rented to grow fruit organically, tropical fruits were available even in the winter. Though he didn’t seem to notice the grapefruits and pineapples, the boy stopped in front of a mountain of apples and, picking out a bright red one about the size of his fist, carefully put it into the cart. The shopping cart was big enough to hold a baby, but all we had in it so far were one box of eight chocolate kisses, a package of frozen dogs and another with a dozen fish sticks, and this one small apple.

Letting go of the cart, the boy grabbed the hem of my coat and dragged me over to the cereal section. A middle-aged man, graying at the temples, was holding an ocher-colored box of cereal, intently reading the explanation on the back. That culture—I saw it in the design on the box. That culture . . . The name was caught somewhere in the back of my throat and wouldn’t come out. When I tried to recover it, the words “Asuka Culture” rose up in my mind, blocking the way.