Yuichi flicked at the pebbles of different sizes and colors she’d lined up in a neat row on the plywood board. Did they mean anything? Yuichi scooped them up. As he squeezed them, they clicked against each other in his palm.

Mitsuyo… He called her name as he fingered the pebbles. No other words came. A sudden commotion was coming from the base of the hill. Usually he and Mitsuyo couldn’t hear anything from down there, but now something ominous was filtering up the slope.

Pebbles still in his hand, he ran outside. The sun had set now, and the border between the sea and the mountain had vanished. Red lights of a patrol car were visible among the faint lights of the town below. Not just one, but many, coming from all directions, red lights converging on the town. Sirens, like waves, rang out from down below.

In all the commotion, the mountain seemed all the more silent. Yuichi turned away and gazed at the towering lighthouse. It soared upward, as if propping up the night sky.

He remembered when he was a child, when his mother abandoned him and he’d stared across to the lighthouse on the other shore.

“I’ll be right back,” his mother had told him, and disappeared. Yuichi had believed her. He waited and waited but she never returned. It must be because I did something bad, he’d thought. And he’d tried his hardest to think what that could be. But no matter how hard he thought about it, he couldn’t figure out why she’d be so mad at him.

The last ferryboat was just leaving then. Yuichi, tired from waiting, was walking along the pier when a little girl ran up to him from the parking lot. She must have just learned to walk, for she didn’t seem to know how to put the brakes on her running feet. Yuichi reached out and held her to stop her from running. The little girl’s look of relief was something he could clearly picture, even now. As the girl’s father ran over and lifted her up, the girl reached out to Yuichi and offered him the stick of chikuwa in her hand. Yuichi declined, but the girl’s father said, “We just bought it, so please go ahead,” and he handed it to Yuichi. Yuichi thanked him and took it.

When he thought about it later, he realized that from the time his mother left him, until the next morning when one of the ferry workers discovered him there, all he ate was that stick of chikuwa.

Yuichi tossed the pebbles in his hand at the lighthouse above him. Mitsuyo… he thought again. The pebbles flew in all directions, only the largest one actually striking the base of the lighthouse.

Mitsuyo might be in one of those patrol cars. She might have been arrested. If they grabbed her, I have to go rescue her. Go right away and tell them, “I wanted her to come with me. I threatened her and made her come with me.” No. Mitsuyo will be back. No way the cops got her. She bought a lot of things at the convenience store and will come back, a smile on her face, saying, “Sorry I’m late!” She said she’d be right back. She smiled when she said that, when she left.

Yuichi picked up a stone from the ground and flung it hard against the lighthouse.

Without Mitsuyo, all he felt was pain. Mitsuyo is off somewhere right now, alone, he thought. The last thing I want is for her to feel this kind of pain. It’s enough that I feel it.

The bark of the tree broke off under her grip and stabbed beneath her fingernails. Mitsuyo gritted her teeth, not giving in to the pain, grabbed a thin branch, and stepped up on top of a boulder.

The woods were pitch-black and wherever she stepped were fallen dead trees. Dead trees she could handle, but not the moss-covered rocks. She slipped on them over and over, tumbling to the damp ground.

After she climbed out the window of the police station, her only thought was to get to the top of the hill, to the lighthouse. On the way, as she was running through the garden of someone’s house, an old woman sitting on the porch had called out to her, but she clambered over the wall without looking back and ran into the dark woods.

The snow piled up on tree branches and leaves and she could barely make out her surroundings. She’d lost all feeling in her fingers. She looked up and saw the sky beyond the branches ahead of her. If she could make it that far, she would be at the lighthouse, where Yuichi was waiting. The bushes she grabbed on to had thorns; the thin branches bent back and snapped into her face.

Still she climbed on, clambering over the rocks. The sorrow that had swept over her in the back of the patrol car was pursuing her, and would catch her if she stopped for even a moment. She no longer had the willpower to consider what she was doing, or what she had done. All she wanted was to see Yuichi one more time. It hurt not to have him by her side, right this instant. He was there at the lighthouse, waiting for her, and she couldn’t stand to make him feel any lonelier.

She had no idea where this strength was coming from. Or where she found the power to love someone so much.

“Yuichi!”

With each freezing branch whipping across her face, she bit her lip and called out to him.

Yuichi’s at the lighthouse, waiting for me. I know he’s waiting for me. Have I ever had a place like this before, ever? And I can make it there… If I can only make it, I’ll be with the one who loves me. In all my thirty years, have I ever had a place like this? But I’ve found it now. And that’s where I’m heading.

Mitsuyo grabbed at the cold branches with her numb hands and climbed up the wet rocks.

On this day the temperature in the northern part of Kyushu fell below zero degrees centigrade. At five p.m. the decision was made to temporarily lower the speed limit on the entire Kyushu Expressway. Chains were required for cars driving through the mountains and fog started to envelop the cities. The evening news announced that a snowstorm was coming that night and reporters feared that traffic would grind to a halt. It was after five-thirty when Mitsuse Pass was closed to traffic. This announcement scrolled across the TV screen during the entertainment-news report and soon disappeared.

Just around that time, an old woman showed up at a police station in a small harbor town. She explained that twenty minutes before, a young woman had crossed through her garden and gone up into the hills behind. The patrolman, terribly pale looking, took down her report and hurriedly spread a map before him. Today, for some reason, this sleepy harbor town was crawling with police.

Up the hill behind the old woman’s house was a lighthouse that was no longer being used. The assembled policemen’s fingers rested on top of the map.

“I asked where she was going but she went into the hills without even looking around once.”

The policemen didn’t hear this last explanation from the old woman, for they were already out the door.

Around the same time, Yuichi had decided to come down off the mountain and was packing up the sleeping bag inside the caretaker’s shack. He knew he’d be arrested if he came down to the town, and wouldn’t have a chance to ever use the sleeping bag, but still he shouldered it. With the candles out, the shack was dark, though he could see his cold white breath.

Once he came out of the shack, the disturbance in the town below was louder. The police cars that had been scattered about the town had now formed a line of red lights headed up from the foot of the hills to the lighthouse.

Yuichi went limp. He could barely stand.

And then it happened. Branches in the dark thicket shook, and he heard Mitsuyo, feebly calling out his name. “Mitsuyo!” he yelled out.

“Yuichi!” she called back. Branches shook and snow slipped from the leaves. Yuichi leaped over the fence and raced into the dark thicket. Mitsuyo’s hair was full of dead leaves and twigs, her fingertips were bloody, her eyes wet with tears.