Discuss an instance when Ogawa uses a metaphor or simile to demonstrate the desolation that begins to characterize the island after many disappearances.

Though the narrator does not again mention her parents' fondness for meeting at the rose garden on top of the hill, the reader recalls the association. So when the narrator goes to visit the rose garden after the roses have all been disappeared, the simile she uses reflects her feeling of losing one more aspect of her parents' memories. After telling the reader that "needless to say, not a single flower" is left in the rose garden, she states, "The bare stalks, reduced to leaves and thorns," are "thrust into the slope like brittle bones" (48).