She finds the night outside pleasantly cool and still. She finds her mother at the rear of the garden, as expected. Mother sits on a small stone bench beside a small artificial pond, ringed by fragrant flowers and flowering forsythia. Her long robe is so pale a pastel pink it seems white, a luminous white, lit by the crescent moon just visible through the trees at the rear of the property. That same light makes mother's jet black hair seem lush and glossy. She once had hair as long as Machiko's own. Now she wears it close by the shoulders, softly styled.