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A grey spring morning in a set of quiet rooms inside the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The Emperor of Japan stands at the kitchen window with a cup of green tea going lukewarm in his hand.

She was a Harvard-educated diplomat with a career in front of her. She turned him down twice. He waited seven years, and when he asked again he promised, in front of witnesses, that he would protect her for as long as he lived.

This is the story of whether he managed it — of a woman who entered the most rigid institution on earth and very nearly disappeared inside it, and of a husband who broke protocol to say out loud that his wife was being crushed.