“It was a long, long time ago. Each of them was sleeping in a liquid inside a small flask about the size of a human thumb. All of them had oyster-coloured skins and were shaped like shrimps.

In a glass case at the end of a row of shelves in a dark corridor of an obstetrics and gynaecology hospital near the Tanzawa mountains in Kanagawa, countless foetuses in formaldehyde were quietly leaning on each other as they looked out into the sun-drenched courtyard.”