Rinji Kamiya opened the door and found a girl he had never seen before. Her skin was pale enough to fade into the sunlight. Two thick black braids made her oval face look smaller still. The lake-blue eyes in that delicate face bewildered him most of all. She stepped aside for him, and the heavy skirt of her northern dress fluttered once. The garment, some old-style ethnic thing from the far north, made his studded boots and glossy jacket look as if they had blundered in from a different century. Rinji looked up in reflex, checking the number on the house again. This was indeed 13 Pisces Street, his home. He was already half turned to apologize for the mistake and leave when she stopped him in perfect standard Japanese. "Brother, where are you going? This is your home." When she smiled, she looked like some ripe, impossible fruit grown out of birch woods and agate grassland beyond the country's northern border.
The girl in the old northern dress busied herself in the kitchen and brought out two dishes rich in color and scent. She called them piroshki and soup, Russian-style food from her town. Between mouthfuls Rinji learned where she had come from. His younger uncle was a photographer who, more than twenty years earlier, had wandered to the edge of the Soya Strait and discovered a small frontier town named Rebun under the Shiretoko ranges, a place where on a clear day one could look across the water toward Russian territory. It was a mixed-blood settlement on the northern coast of Hokkaido, full of warm log houses, Russian steam baths, and people whose faces still carried Russian softness and depth. His uncle had fallen in love with the place, settled there, married a local woman, and, after years without children, adopted a baby girl found floating down from the strait in a wooden washbasin. They named her Zoya Aizawa, the Russian word for life. She had grown up in Rebun without leaving once in sixteen years, making friends with foals and foxes and white rabbits, listening to her father talk about the south until she could not bear it anymore. One night she slept in the horse stall beside a newborn white colt, looking at the place that had raised her. The next morning she burst into the log house, woke her father, and announced that she wanted to see Tokyo Tower and the Sumida River and find out how they differed from the mountains of Shiretoko and the Soya Strait, that she wanted to see a city that shone at night as brightly as day. That was how the simple-hearted Zoya left Rebun for the first time in her life, flew from Sapporo to Tokyo, and, while the plane ran above the clouds, asked the flight attendant in amazement, hugging a cup of hot coffee, what would happen if they hit an angel. Rinji laughed at that, but Zoya's sapphire eyes remained solemn and holy. He withdrew the smile and retreated to his room, already wondering how he was meant to endure living with this country bumpkin. That old northern dress should be put away. Those black braids should come down. The habit of gasping over every little thing had to go. City girls wore Korean coats and Japanese skirts or fitted Western tops. They gathered their hair in sweet little buns and smiled as though the world had been designed expressly for them. Rinji updated his blog and mocked Zoya Aizawa's amazement at every detail of Tokyo. His online friends immediately chimed in. What a rare little hick, one wrote. Rinji looked at the screen and curved his beautiful lips into a knowing smile. Exactly, he typed back.
If not for his mother's pressure and the promise of extra spending money, Rinji would never have taken her to school with him. All the way there Zoya tugged at his sleeve, pointing at Tokyo's tall buildings and exclaiming that they were so high they made her neck ache. Rinji looked down only to see the neat shirt he had ironed pulled all out of shape and snapped at her to be quiet. She did fall quiet, but trouble found him anyway. At the school gate he coldly suggested they part ways. He wanted distance between them on campus. But then the blue-eyed Shiori asked who the unfamiliar girl was that people had seen him with that morning. Shiori's blue eyes came from colored contact lenses; if she felt like it, they could turn red or gray instead. He patted her on the head and lied that Zoya was just his uncle's daughter staying over for a while. Girls could always make the strangest conclusions out of the smallest details, and Shiori immediately told him that whatever happened he was not allowed to change his heart. Then the school broadcast announced that second-year class three's Rinji Kamiya was to report to the staff room. That in itself was hardly unusual. It was the age of rebellion, and Rinji was especially committed to it. What was unusual was that he had been called in because of Zoya. When he pushed open the door, he found her standing there with her head lowered, her eyes lifted toward him like a hurt little animal cornered in the dark. The teacher was furious. He was told to control his sister. She had barged into another class during lessons and confessed to a boy in front of the teacher, openly destroying school discipline. Rinji shot her a glare. She shrank farther into the corner, and the tears she had been holding back finally spilled over. The punishment was to write a letter of self-criticism, and he was ordered to stay after school and supervise her. Thinking of Haruna from Seventh High waiting for him in front of the school sent flames up through him. He called Haruna to say he would be an hour late, then sat down opposite the nuisance who had ruined everything. "Was it your boyfriend?" he asked. "How does somebody end up running into a classroom to confess on their first day?" Haltingly, with tears catching in her voice, she explained. After he had abandoned her at the gate that morning, the crowds had swallowed her up. She had no idea which way to go. The bell rang and she still could not find her classroom. Passing one room, she saw by the window in the third row a familiar boy's face. A year earlier, that boy had been a runaway Tokyo tourist visiting Rebun alone, no tour group, just stolen money and a finger laid blindly on a map. He stayed there two months. In those two months he kissed her eyes with rose-colored lips and described to her Tokyo's damp sea wind and the forest of stone unlike anything in Rebun. He saved her inside his digital camera and said that if he was ever unhappy, he would look at her blue smile. When the money ran out, he had no choice but to return home. Before leaving, he told her that if they ever met again in the midst of the great human sea, they would never be allowed to part. Travelers, she said, always think of themselves as passersby in a beautiful landscape, making promises as lightly as wind. They never think that the flower touched by that wind will spend the rest of its life waiting for its return. A year later Zoya came to Tokyo partly because she wanted to see the world that had shaped him and partly to test whether they might meet again. Her luck had been good. The result had been terrible. The boy was no longer the angry runaway from before. The city had combed him smooth again. He now wore secret love like an accessory among butterfly-wing girls in his class, and he had forgotten Zoya Aizawa the way people are ashamed to remember the time they ran from home and were brought back by the police. So when she burst into the classroom in desperate joy, he was only frightened, as if an old wound he preferred not to touch had been slit open again. Hearing all this, Rinji called Haruna a second time to cancel altogether, snatched the untouched self-criticism sheet from Zoya, and hauled her to her feet. What was she supposed to write? That was not a thing she ought to apologize for.
They walked home slowly. Rinji, out of habit, walked too fast, and after a while he noticed she had fallen behind. When he turned, he saw her standing there crying quietly. She no longer wore the old northern dress by then, but she still dressed with the habits of the cold country, bundled up like a soft brown bear, slow and awkward among the sleek glass towers and rivers of traffic. Set her against a backdrop of blue sky and grassland, and she would have been breathtaking. Set her here in modern Tokyo, and she looked faintly ridiculous. For the first time he softened. He went back, handed her a tissue, stared at her reddened nose, and muttered that perhaps she should just go home. But Zoya shook her head at once. "I came for him, but I've chosen to stay for myself." Even in Rebun she had always stared at the endless mountains and grasslands and wondered about the dazzling world travelers described. The wider the world, she said, the wider a life could become.
For Zoya, Tokyo soon became a dream she could not wake from. Rinji had two girlfriends, Shiori at his own school and Haruna at Seventh High, and neither knew the other existed. Both knew only that he was cold, and in a handsome boy a little coldness passed for mystery. Rinji was too popular. Girls constantly sent him half-flirtatious messages asking what he felt, and he ignored them with a practiced arrogance. To Zoya, the whole system of urban romance was almost incomprehensible. She might never have understood it if she had not stumbled across it with her own eyes. On Saturday, while his mother took her shopping for new clothes, she saw Rinji holding Shiori's hand as the two of them picked out crystal bracelets. Zoya panicked and dragged his mother upstairs to the third floor, babbling nonsense to distract her. Maybe that was Haruna, she thought at first, then let the idea go. Cities were full of colors richer than Rebun's, and city girls possessed a pride and polish no village girl could imitate. She felt as though she had fallen into a mad dream and could not bear to leave it. She did not go looking for the boy from Rebun again. She had already learned one truth and enough of another: she did not belong in such a dream. Girls like Haruna could sing Jolin Tsai songs beautifully, dance sexily enough to make boys blush, talk about the newest things happening in Europe or America, and stand at the top of Ferris wheels while boys confessed their love. They smelled of Givenchy's little-bear perfume. She, on the other hand, probably smelled only of mare's milk or wet pinecones from the forest. Then on Sunday she went to the nearby park to feed stray cats and saw Rinji there too, lowering his head to take a bite from another girl's ice cream, then kissing her halfway through. Her gaze was so direct it seemed to cut the air. He sensed it and opened his eyes, finding her behind a tree, face red, while a cat clutched at her leg impatiently for food. She crouched to scatter fish bones, still trying to excuse him in her own mind. Maybe, she thought, he had broken up with the girl from yesterday and simply moved on to the girl from today a little too quickly. That night Rinji came into her room and startled her. If she ever ran into Shiori at school, he said, she was not to mention anything she had seen. "Shiori?" she echoed. "A new name? So Saturday's girl?" Rinji answered flatly that he had two girlfriends, and if one had not gone abroad, he ought to count himself as having three. After warning her, he turned to leave, but she followed him to his room and blurted out what had risen to her lips. She told him that in the forests near Shiretoko there were animals that chose mates for life. She had seen one die and the other stay beside it, refusing even millet from her hand until it starved too. Did he know what that meant? Rinji cut her off, asking whether she was circling around to call him shameless. Then he looked at her. She had put on the new pale-yellow dress his mother bought her, and after washing her hair had left it hanging down like a waterfall to her waist. Against his will he admitted to himself that, properly dressed, she was more beautiful than any of the school beauties he had ever dated. So instead he said the cruelest thing he could think of: did she really imagine that wearing pretty clothes would change the hick in her or make that boy like her? She went silent, then more silent, and finally returned to her room. Her back lodged in him like a thorn. He knew he despised himself exactly as much as he despised her.
But Zoya was not stupid. Watching the girls around her for a while was enough to teach her what it was about her that made them raise their brows. So she learned to rein herself in. She wore the clothes Rinji's mother bought for her and smiled at everyone with a lotus-like softness. The honesty shining in her eyes was too affecting to resist, and before long people forgot the strange first day when she had burst into a classroom to confess to a boy. On top of that, once she opened her mouth in music class, everyone heard at once that her voice was like a gift from heaven. The music teacher treasured her immediately, and Zoya herself fell in love with the music room and began going there every day. One day the student council president, Kirishima, happened to pass the door and stopped dead, held in place by the clear, streaming sound of her singing. He stood there until the sunset went down beside it. Then he pushed open the door and called, "Hey, you." Looking up into the blue, sunlit sapphire of her eyes, he bowed his head with the delighted smile of someone who had found exactly what he wanted. Kirishima went straight to Rinji. Rinji greeted him by hurling a basketball, wishing it would knock his face into a honeycomb. Kirishima caught it easily and laughed. "Rinji Kamiya, I like your sister, Zoya Aizawa." Rinji was too lazy to explain to anyone that Zoya was not his real cousin at all, only a girl his uncle had found and raised, so everyone simply concluded that good genes ran in the family from brother to sister alike. And when Kirishima spoke, Rinji snatched the ball back and rammed it through the hoop. Lately too many of his so-called friends had been hinting that he ought to introduce Zoya to them. And now Kirishima too, that irritating boy he had hated for two years over some old, childish contest of affections. The first girl Rinji had ever liked had chosen Kirishima instead. When Rinji demanded to know why, she coolly said that Kirishima was taller, cooler, smarter, better liked by teachers, and better than him in every way. Why should she want Rinji? Back then, stung by rejection, he had needed other girls to repair his pride and stuff cotton into the wound she had left. So he began dating one girl after another. A few former ones still clung on. Before he noticed, he was managing two or even three at once. Since he never liked any of them all that much, he never bothered himself over whether he was hurting them. If they wished to burn like moths, he was willing to help them burn. It was a kind of lonely carnival. Only his resentment toward Kirishima never faded. So when Saturday came, and Rinji was heading out to meet friends, he unexpectedly turned and asked whether Zoya wanted to come along. He had ignored everyone's suggestions for ages. It was only Kirishima's open pursuit that made him think of it: he would rather hand Zoya over to someone else than let Kirishima win. Perhaps because he was usually so cold, the invitation left Zoya almost overwhelmed. She sprang up and nodded at once. In the underground passage, a tall man suddenly blocked her path and held out a hand, saying he had lost his wallet and needed ten yen to get home. Zoya immediately said yes and reached for her purse. Rinji dragged her away before she could open it. Only when they reached the far end of the passage did he stop and explode, calling her an idiot. The man had obviously been scamming people. But what if he had been telling the truth, she asked, lifting those impossibly blue eyes to him, eyes that made the dust all over his own reflection painfully clear. Then she turned back and went looking for the stranger, saying that in her town they did not even lock their doors at night, that the place was so quiet even the dogs slept peacefully, while in Tokyo every building had guards and codes and iron doors as though every human being were another threat. The man was gone by then, vanished out another exit. Rinji watched her stand there a while in disappointment and then walk back to him and ask where they were going. "Nowhere," he said abruptly, taking her hand and walking faster and faster under the night. He wore a white shirt. She happened to be in a white wool dress. Together they looked like two white foxes passing through a dream. Had she ever ridden a Ferris wheel at night, he asked? From above, Tokyo had never looked so beautiful. At the last moment he decided not to take her to karaoke, where his wolfish friends would certainly have started forcing people into truth-or-dare and king's games that always ended with somebody being made to hug or kiss a girl. Those boys used intimacy as a tool. It was how he had first managed to kiss Haruna's cheek. But that night, suddenly, he could not bear the thought of it. He did not want them touching her. No, more than that, he could not bear the thought of her being used.
The Ferris wheel appeared often in Zoya's dreams after that. The boy sitting before a city strewn with stars had spoken so slowly, so softly, his back written through with hurt. He told her that he knew she looked down on him, but that he too had once sincerely liked a girl. Back in middle school he had not yet become the sort of person who weighed every word and glance. He had wandered around in his school uniform, hair combed with one careless hand, his grades just as bad as they still were. The girl had been the class helper for English, assigned to tutor his disastrous language skills. She spoke British English, far softer and more elegant than the American accent everyone was used to. Little by little he had fallen very much in love with her. Then one day he saw her crying because Kirishima had treated her coldly, and he confessed. She reacted as if his love had insulted her and reduced him to nothing with a few contemptuous words. That was when he learned that some girls would rather suffer a magnificent injury than receive plain, ordinary kindness. He learned that boys had to dress better, pretend to be a little cool, hold something back, and make themselves just out of reach for girls to like them more. After that, plenty of girls liked him in high school, but no matter how hard he tried, he never again felt that pure, foolish way of liking someone. He asked why he was even telling her all this. Maybe, he said, it was because at the amusement park gate that day he had crossed paths with that girl again and she had not recognized him at all, only smiled politely on the arm of another boy. If he had approached her when her boyfriend stepped away, she probably would even have given him her number. "You know, Zoya Aizawa, sometimes you're so pure it makes people hate themselves. In front of you it's too easy to feel how dirty they are." He spent nearly the whole long Ferris wheel ride talking to himself like that. Zoya had no words with which to comfort him. She only finally understood why he had grown into such a thin, brittle creature, like an animal once caught in a trap that can never walk carelessly again. After that night the distance between them lessened. They went to school together and came home together, except on the occasional days when he was off meeting Shiori or Haruna. Kirishima, with no help from Rinji, had to seek Zoya out himself and kept doing so despite her repeated refusals. His persistence gradually changed the atmosphere among the girls. The ones who liked Kirishima were displeased to see him work so hard for Zoya. Why her, and not them? When the music teacher put together a chorus for the New Year performance, the girls would all fall silent the moment Zoya opened her mouth at rehearsal, leaving her standing there in embarrassment with no idea what to do. She finally told Rinji in despair, and he suggested she ask to perform a solo instead. She wanted to know why the others were freezing her out, but he only shrugged and lied that who knew why girls did anything. Zoya took his advice, asked the teacher for a solo, and then rehearsed seriously every day, even humming while she washed dishes at home. Rinji told her her solo would definitely win first place at the New Year show. She turned those laughing eyes on him and kept asking, really, really? and he answered again and again that yes, really. His mother looked up in surprise more than once and asked when on earth the two of them had become so close.
The trouble came during the dress rehearsal. Zoya did not know how to use makeup, so she waited backstage until all the other girls had finished and were available to help her. By the time Rinji, who had been pacing outside, finally lost patience and came in, the sight before him made him think for one dazed second of a deer from a fairy tale. His mother had chosen her a green trailing dress that turned her into some transparent forest spirit. But the face beneath it was a disaster. Too much powder, lipstick too red, her eyes painted into panda smudges. Rinji shoved aside the girl who had done it, took up a makeup pad, and began wiping Zoya's face with fierce concentration. She had no idea why he was so angry and could only soothe him weakly. Just then Kirishima pushed aside the curtain and came in. And in that instant Rinji almost let all his resentment go. If Kirishima could protect Zoya with his own strength from those vicious girls, then perhaps Rinji really could hand her over. But Kirishima stood there instead like a child who had done wrong, too ashamed to meet her clear gaze. He told her that her solo had been canceled. A little later, after utter chaos, Rinji and Zoya walked out beneath the moon. He did not care to think what it meant that he had punched the student council president. He only dragged her hand in his and walked faster and faster, furious at the world. Kirishima's official reason had been that the show was too long and a few unimportant pieces had to be cut. Only after Rinji hit him did the real story come out. The principal's daughter also had a solo and was desperate to shine before the whole school. Once she heard Zoya sing, she panicked at the thought of being outdone and asked Kirishima, who was helping run the event, to find an excuse to cut Zoya's song. Kirishima had mapped out his future carefully. He wanted recommendations and extra points for entrance exams, and at the critical moment ambition had outweighed whatever feeling he had for her. However much he liked her, in the end it did not matter more than his need to win. They had walked far from the school by then, but the stirring music from the hall still reached them. When the principal's daughter began singing, Zoya stopped, turned back toward the sound, and said sadly that he had once stopped her outside the music room and told her he liked her very, very much. Rinji started to apologize, but she only smiled as brightly as ever and asked why he was apologizing. She had known all along that the like in those words was never very deep. So she was not truly heartbroken now. She was only sad that someone had spoken so full of lies. He stared at her, bewildered. He had thought she was simple and easy to deceive. But she said she had seen the truth in his eyes. That sentence flew into him like a bird, lifting above everything at once. She had seen in the forest the eyes animals turned on each other in life and death. She had seen, in the Ferris wheel, the vulnerable eyes of a boy trying not to be vulnerable. Compared beside them, Kirishima's gaze had never once been the same. That pure, steady look had been like the slow current of the Soya Strait itself. While he stood there flustered, she began softly singing the Russian folk song she had meant to perform. It was about a coachman dying on the grassland and asking a traveler to bury him, to return his horse to his father, to comfort his mother, to return the engagement ring to his beloved and tell her they would never meet again. The song she had intended to sing would go on. No thing and no force would stop it. Something strange and sharp moved in Rinji's chest. For the first time in his life he wanted to end things cleanly. For the first time he wanted purity with the same greed he had once wanted attention, admiration, popularity among girls. No, something deeper than those. He found himself longing to run toward her with clean hands.
Haruna accepted the breakup with almost eerie calm. Only Shiori would not let go. She kept digging around behind the scenes, which was why the whole tangle that Rinji had kept hidden for so long finally came apart. Shiori's older brother was a high-school dropout with nothing to do and far too much aggression. He waited outside the school gate after classes and knocked Rinji flat with one punch. Shiori stood there watching coldly while Rinji took the blows. Zoya clutched her sleeve and begged her to stop. Then, in her desperation, she blurted out the truth: Shiori did not really like him that much anyway. Wasn't she with him only because he was handsome, or because she was lonely? Otherwise why was she being so cold now? Wasn't her pain less about losing him than about realizing she had been deceived? But all that got her was fury in return. Did she think she knew Rinji at all? Had she seen the things he wrote about her on his blog, mocking her like some ridiculous street spectacle? Zoya stood in the sunlight and felt as if she had been dropped into an ice cellar. Later, sitting at the computer, she read every last entry in silence. Then she went back to her room and began to pack. Halfway through she stopped and stood at the window. The city before her was enormous. Cars were beetles. People were ants. Streets ran on beyond sight. People met and, because they knew they would soon lose each other, refused to give much of themselves at all. These were things she could never learn. No wonder her father had lived in Rebun so many years and, before sending her away, given her only one sentence: the world is vast, but the heart is narrow. She had come wearing Blachi, and she would leave wearing Blachi. She had come with an unbroken heart and would leave with one shattered into pieces. She was carrying too many wounds now. She would have to go back to the forest and let the simple little animals lick them clean.
Watching the airplane rise up through the clouds, Rinji Kamiya found himself thinking of that question she once asked on the plane: what if it hit an angel? He had once imagined stripping himself of everything and running cleanly toward her, but she had been too pure, and melted like snow beneath sunlight before he could reach her. He had been rained on by her gentleness and still managed to keep none of it. Then the tears he shed washed away a little of the dirt on him. Someday, he thought, perhaps when he had been made new, perhaps then he would finally be worthy of saying the words he could not say in time: that he liked her.