Prologue: Hokkaido, March 4th, 1952
I was excited.
Really. Excited.
The life-changing kind of excited.
And yet, all I could do was stare at the letter of acceptance with my mouth hanging open, like the kind of slow-to-think idiot a few girls from my class sometimes said I was. I was sure that right then I probably didn't fit the look of an aspiring singer with such big dreams, but while looking at that letter, I did have dreams.
Dreams of the utmost grandeur.
I mean, how could I have possibly gotten into the most prestigious high school that Tokyo had to offer?
I was the furthest thing from a model student.
Throughout all of Junior high, I had been a complete mess, constantly oversleeping and lending up tardy, average grades that fluctuated more towards the poor side, and worst of all, I was kind of boring and plain-looking. Even my mother had once said I would be better suited for the Meiji Era, which, all things considered, was really not okay since the Meiji Era ended in 1912. It wasn't like I was ugly or anything, but I wasn't very pretty, either.
I wasn't up to date with the latest clothing trends, I didn't wear makeup, or curl my hair, nothing. In fact, even though I had the longest hair of all the girls in my entire school, the most I ever did was tie it into pigtails, which people sometimes teased me about.
Pigtails were juvenile, and we going to be graduating from middle school soon.
People in the future who would look our graduating photo would definitely notice that I wasn't half as stylish as the girls around me, but I didn't care. I had plans to change that. Once I entered high school, I would work hard to become be lively, cheerful, and as lovely as a flower. Perhaps I would even take a daring leap and cut my hair short.
I was so absorbed in my own dreams and possibilities that I didn't even realize that my mother was calling me until she touched my arm.
"Mai-chan," she scolded. "Did you hear me?"
I jumped and turned, meeting her warm brown eyes with a start.
"Oh, hello mother!" I greeted, smiling. "Forgive me! I was lost in thought."
"Mai-chan," my mom sighed, "I asked you to grab the mail for me. You shouldn't be spacing out."
"Forgive me," I repeated, turning and holding up the letter. "I... I was just..."
"Hm?" my mother asked, peering at the letter of acceptance more closely. "What's that?"
I felt giddiness rising up my throat and couldn't contain myself.
My mother's eyes widened when I started jumping up and down, happily bouncing around the kitchen.
"I got accepted into Horikoshi High School!" I cried. "Mother, I did it! I'm going to my school of choice, in Tokyo!"
Her eyes widened in shock.
"Oh, my!" she gasped, wrapping me up in a joyful hug. "My baby! You did it! You really did it! Oh, this calls for a red bean dinner! Just wait until I tell your father!"
"You're going to send him a telegram?"
"Of course," she exclaimed, but then her face faded into the expression I had seen everywhere lately. "He deserves a bit of good news."
I didn't respond to that since I knew exactly what she meant.
Everyone around me was still upset and crazed over losing the war. Only seven years had passed since the Americans had destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima with their atomic bombs.
Riots were still breaking out here and there, and while many people no longer had to worry about the air raids, the anger and unrest within Japan as a whole was worrisome.
My own father, a soldier in the Japanese army, had been particularly angry about it.
"Mother," I tentatively murmured, setting my letter of acceptance on the table, "since the weather is so nice, may I go to down to the shore for a little while? I want to see the ocean before supper."
"Of course, Mai-chan," she said, smiling at me. "While you do that, I'll tell your little sister the good news and telegram your father, but when you come back, be sure to change out of your uniform."
Feeling delighted, I ran for the front door, taking a moment to put my shoes on before heading outside. The warm ocean breeze caressed my face when I started walking down the street, bringing with it the smell of salt and oil. I tilted my head back and looked up at the sky, reveling in the feeling of the wind in my hair.
It had been a very long time since I'd been allowed to head to the shore. With the threat of raids and bombings going on, nobody had been allowed to set foot there since the beach was so far from any of the shelters.
Hokkaido had mostly been overlooked in comparison to other places, but it had seen its fare share of hardship during the war, and the results were still lingering in the people who'd been forced to experience it.
I paused when I noticed something.
Nobody was within sight.
It was oddly quiet.
Uneasiness shot through me and I felt a wave of goosebumps run up my spine. I didn't know why, but something suddenly felt wrong... so wrong, in fact, that I suddenly wanted to go home even though I'd barely walked out the door.
Turning around, I began to trot back towards my house, which was twenty feet away from where I was standing. I could see my little sister waving at me from the upstairs window.
"Onee-chan!" she called. "Wait for me! Mother says I can come to the beach, too!"
"Fumiko, wait!" I called. "I'm not... going..."
I felt a stab of dismay flood through me when she disappeared from the window before I could finish telling her I wasn't going to the beach anymore.
I loved my little sister, don't get me wrong, but she was kind of a handful for a five-year-old. I let out a sigh, looking down at my shoes and staring at the sidewalk beneath my feet. It was then that I noticed something strange. The sidewalk looked lighter than usual, as if a light were shining on it. I blinked, then blinked again, and again as the strange brightness rapidly began to increase. A strange presence suddenly entered my awareness, as though something had just taken up space directly above me.
Several loose strands of my hair drifted in front of my face as I stood there, staring at my shoes with enormous eyes.
My ears began to ring in a deafening manner.
Something bright was being reflected in the shiny black leather of my school loafers.
My first thought was that an airship had dropped a bomb and it was coming right at me.
But that wouldn't have made sense. The war was seven years over and the light was already there.
I don't want to see... I silently whispered, heart speeding up and pounding against my chest. I don't want to look at it...
The world around me distorted a little as the ringing noise grew louder, making me see black and red spots. I felt as though dark and shadowy hands were reaching out to grab me from behind. Hands that would do something terrible to me if I didn't face them.
So, I slowly lifted my head and looked up at the sky to see what the bright thing was.
I squinted up at a light as bright as the sun.
It was like going into a trance. My whole body froze and I was suddenly unable move, to scream, to do anything at all, even look away from the blinding luminescence above me. A hard gust of wind slammed into me, lifting my hair away from my back, tearing at my clothes, sending debris flying down the street even as my body grew so light that my feet left the ground. Panic rose up my throat. I could feel my skirt and even my hair rising towards the sky.
It was as if I was floating, as if I no longer had a center of gravity, as if I were about to fall up.
Which was crazy, this couldn't be happening, but... I could feel it.
My eyes widened in sheer terror and I burst into silent tears as I stared into the blinding light that had somehow caught me.
Then I heard a door open somewhere.
"Onee-chan?!"
My sister's voice.
She sounded startled, confused.
I wanted to scream for help.
To tell her to go get our mother.
But I couldn't.
I strained so hard to turn my head... slowly fighting against my paralysis with tears of fear running down my face. I could see her staring at me through my billowing hair, could see her fright.
Her doe-like eyes, so wide with shock.
Then she was running, dropping her beach pail and plastic shovel, tearing towards me at top speed.
"ONEE-CHAAA-!"
One second I could hear her screaming for me at the top of her lungs, the next, everything around me disappeared as if someone had turned off my eyes like a television screen.
All was darkness.
