This chapter's epigraph comes from a poem by Kyokomachi, a "dullahan" . A dullahan is a woman who lives without her body attached to her head. The poem is about a girl who lives in Okayama, Japan, who visits her family there every year. The girl's head is attached to the body of her dead mother, and the train that takes her to Okayama carries just her body on it. This is a common sense fact, but the girl thinks it's more complicated than that. She thinks that people are surprised to meet her when they meet her, and that it takes time for people to trust her. She tells us that she's just entered school, and she thinks that if they could talk about how she feels, she'd feel better. She says that most people have never met a dullahan before, but that there are only three of them in the entire world. That's right, she says: there's one dullahan in the world, and he's been studying for a long time. If he were to hold her head, she would feel free to refuse, but she doesn't have the power to do so. She's not big enough, she thinks, and there isn't someone big enough to do it for her. So she says she'll hug a student, but not because she wants to, but because she needs someone to show her that she cares.