Being the hero is exhausting. You have to save the world. Being the Ojisan? You just have to make sure the world is a little less scary for the people around you.

She looked up. The word she first made was not Japanese but the soft exhalation of someone startled into trust. “Hei,” she said, half greeting, half sound. He smiled like a man who’d spent half his life learning how to keep silent until silence needed breaking.

"You know," Tanaka said, his voice taking on a storytelling lilt. "Back in the days of Windows 95, we had bugs that would make this look like a typo. We didn't have Stack Overflow. We had to call people on landlines."