Nevermind that she didn't know him, or that he was Japanese. Nevermind that she saw herself as always alone, despite the many people in her life.

[…] he heard the birds sing, and at that he felt comforted.

Now we are liberal with our innermost secrets, spraying them into the public ether with a generosity our forebears could not have imagined. Where we once sent love letters in a sealed envelope, or stuck photographs of our children in a family album, now such private material is despatched to servers and clouds operated by people we don't know and will never meet.

a cooperative game