Chapter One: “The Clod of Earth Awaits the Snow” — Part Two

A small girl in a middle school uniform was spinning her umbrella in slow circles.
That was all the information there was — and what surprised me within it was a colour I hadn’t expected.
Yellow-green eyes.
Eyes of another country, deflecting the strengthening rain, luminous, gazing at me through the camera. The girl had no way of knowing, but we were looking directly at each other — and that was what had startled me.
I gathered myself, made sense of what had arrived, and finally felt my composure return. I took a breath, and answered.
“Yes, who is it?”
“I’m in the same class as Amamiya-san. I’ve come to drop off the handouts from while she’s been away.”
Like a raindrop — touching for just a moment before being absorbed and gone. That kind of pale, quiet voice.
“That’s… how kind. One moment, please.”
I stepped back from the intercom.
The face didn’t match any of the friends my daughter had brought home before.
Small, slight — the same uniform as my daughter’s school. Judging by appearances alone there didn’t seem to be any deception, but I thought I should have my daughter confirm it. I went back to my daughter’s room and found her at that moment blissfully narrowing her eyes as she drank the mandarin syrup from the bowl. What exactly was well-timed about that.
“Someone from your class has come to bring school handouts.”
“Hmm, who?”
“Can you walk well enough to come and check?”
Fine, my daughter said, setting the yellow bowl aside and slowly getting up. The way she walked from there was steady enough, so she probably was fine, just as she’d said.
I brought my daughter back to the intercom. My daughter glanced at the screen and immediately said the name.
“It’s Chitaira-san.”
So it was true — she really was a classmate.
“Chitaira…”
And the name meant something to me, too. There was a family by that name, wasn’t there — the one with the absurdly grand house. The kind of house you could fit several of ours into, side by side… I had only ever looked at it from a distance, never had anything to do with it. I had thought of them as the sort of people who moved in entirely different circles — but was this their daughter?
“I’m sorry for making you wait in the rain, I’ll come out to you now.”
“Okay.”
The figure on the screen didn’t move a muscle. She stood perfectly straight, like a part of the rain itself.
“Should I go instead?”
“What are you talking about — it’s raining outside.”
I steered my daughter back toward the room with a hand on her shoulder. After two days lying down she was probably desperate to move around; my daughter made a disgruntled sound that I found endearing and ignored, sending her back to bed. At this rate she’d probably be able to go to school tomorrow.
I stepped into the sandals by the door, the easy ones, and thought — it’ll only take a moment, just to receive something — and went outside without an umbrella. The rain was heavier than when I’d come home, and I immediately regretted not bringing one; but the girl’s gaze had been fixed so steadily in my direction the whole time that I didn’t turn back, and kept walking toward my daughter’s friend. Even in the grey darkness of a rainy day, even beneath an umbrella spread like a piece of night sky, no matter how hard it rained — those eyes were so vivid, so startlingly present, that I found myself moving toward them as if drawn.
“Hello.”
The girl stopped spinning her umbrella. Her voice was small, and yet reached me without being swallowed by the rain.
“Hello…”
Water droplets fell from the stilled umbrella in a thin, continuous stream, like tears with all the feeling wrung out.
Skin so pale it seemed to have outlasted the entire long summer without once being touched by it. Small — not just compared to me, but compared to my daughter who was the same age; the difference in our eye levels must have been twenty centimetres. A face that looked young even for a middle schooler, as if the uniform were something she was still growing into; thin lips that were visibly chapped at a glance. Her hair — walnut-brown, cut to about collarbone length — was slightly uneven, and that slight unevenness was somehow off. Amateur hands, somehow. Was she actually cutting it herself?
And behind bangs that were just a little too long, those eyes.
A pair of yellow-green irises, glossy as muscat grapes, gazing steadily up at me.
“Umm…”
“Kai. Chitaira Kai.”
The girl was — this was entirely a personal, subjective assessment — a beauty who commandeered your attention and stole your gaze.
“Kai.”
My thoughts lost their shape for a moment and I simply repeated it back.
“It’s written like this.”
She drew the kanji in the air with her index finger. I read it: 塊. Katamari. A lump. A clod.
For such a small, almost ephemeral-looking girl, it seemed like a name that didn’t quite fit.
But more than her name — those eyes.
Meeting her gaze, something rose up — a pain like thorns slowly working into my heart, and an inexplicable sense of weightlessness.
And in the midst of all that feeling tangling around those eyes, why was there something almost like déjà vu mixed in? Perhaps we had passed each other somewhere in town before. I was trying to remember the origin of it when Chitaira Kai stretched up on her toes and extended her umbrella out over me. The thought was lovely, but the umbrella came alarmingly close to my forehead.
“You’re tall.”
“…Ah. Yes, I suppose.”
I could hardly say you’re just short — not out loud. The last time I’d checked was at university, but I was around 165, and this girl hadn’t reached 150, I was sure. Actually… 140 was looking questionable too, but perhaps I was being uncharitable.
I’d be going back in immediately, but I took the umbrella from Chitaira Kai and held it myself.
Kai looked at her now-empty hand for a moment, then, as if remembering the purpose of her visit, held out what she’d been carrying.
“These are the printouts and things from school.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
I took them — they’d been wrapped in a plastic bag to keep off the rain. And then Kai moved closer, as if she had now earned the right to be under the umbrella. Those eyes — holding both a fathomless depth that looked as though they might swallow even the rainwater flowing past, and something luminous, almost terrifying — gazed up at me from close range.
What was it in me, what operation of my own heart, that produced this sensation — as if a water level that didn’t exist were rising to my throat. The sound of rain against the umbrella felt distant. My feet were stitched to the spot, unable to leave the shadow beneath them.
Then Kai’s lips moved.
“Amamiya’s mum is, like, seriously beautiful.”
She shifted her register entirely, as if doing an impression of someone. That part was fine — but the impression required her to open her eyes wide and her mouth wider, and it was a little alarming. Then, like a playback function, the moment the line was delivered she returned to her quiet smile.
“The girls in class were saying it, so I wondered what kind of person she was — but you really are lovely, I was surprised.”
Being evaluated so plainly and directly, I felt colour rising in my cheeks in a way that didn’t suit my age at all.
“That’s… well, thank you…?”
The cold of the rain on my flushed skin was, ironically, pleasant.
As if a spell had finally broken, I returned the umbrella. Kai slung it over her shoulder again like a piece of the night gathered around her — and walked away.
Pressing two yellow-green stars deep into my heart.
I stood there, makeup still on but bangs gone wet and plastered to my face, unable to look away —
watching Chitaira Kai dissolve into the far distance the way her name suggested, drinking the rain into the earth.
Standing in the heavy rain without an umbrella, a fool, and seeing her off.

My daughter had a cold. I had left work early. A classmate had come to drop off school handouts.
That was all it was.
That was all it took for a turning point in a life to be made.
From meeting just one girl — a girl who knew nothing.
This was how I and Kai met.