This is an aria for an opera that does not exist in which the main character, Sunao Tsuboi, now eighty, recounts the happiest moment of his life: That night when he and his love, Reiko, lay together on the grass at Sukkeien Garden gazing at the stars. For the first time, they touch hands. It was the only time they ever touched. Mr. Tsuboi's story is real and documented in Stephen Walker's book, Shockwave.

The text and some musical materials are taken from the apocryphal Noh play, Kajiikaze, by Totonobu. In the play, much of the text was borrowed from works by the waza-uta-style poet and shaman Fujiwara no Mane, now considered by contemporary scholars of the history of eschatology as the "Nostradamus" of pre-medieval Japan. Pertinent excerpts of Fujiwara's masterwork, Jigoku (Hell), eschatologists now read as prophecy of the atomic bomb attacks on Japan during WWII.

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