Prologue
In the far north of Japan, where the mountains huddle close and the wind sings through the pines, there lies a small village, half-forgotten by the world.
Snow falls here for half the year, soft and endless, blanketing crooked roofs and narrow lanes, muffling the sounds of life until all that remains is a hush—a silence so deep it seems to hold the breath of time itself.
The houses are old, their wood darkened by countless winters, their windows glowing faintly with the golden promise of warmth. Smoke rises from chimneys in thin, hopeful threads, curling into the pale sky. The people move quietly, wrapped in layers of patched clothing, their faces marked by the gentle resignation of those who have learned to expect little and endure much.
There is a sadness here, a sadness as old as the mountains, as wide as the snowfields. It is not the sharp pain of loss, but the slow ache of longing – the sadness of all mankind, woven into the fabric of daily life. It lingers in the empty fields, in the silent shrines, in the laughter that never quite reaches the skies.
Yet in this quiet, in this poverty, there is a kind of peace. The village endures, as it always has, through storm and hunger and the slow passage of years. And when the snow falls at dusk, turning the world to silver and silence, it is almost beautiful – the sadness, the stillness, the small lights shining bravely in the dark.
…And into this gentle, aching stillness, a storm of mad bureaucracy and international misadventure was about to descend.
Chapter One
In the remote, frostbitten village of Higashikuma, where the only thing colder than the winters was the welcome extended to outsiders, the municipal office was a monument to both architectural and moral decay. The linoleum curled at the edges like a dying leaf, the radiators hissed with the impotent rage of a thousand bureaucrats, and the only thing that ever ran on time was the clock, which was, of course, broken.
At the heart of this municipal mausoleum sat the new secretary, a woman so strikingly out of place that the villagers had taken to calling her “Miss Tokyo” behind her back, as if her origins were a contagious disease. She was tall, beautiful, and possessed the kind of poise that suggested she had once been accustomed to better things – like central heating, or shoes without holes. Her long, elegant legs propped with exquisite care upon a stack of unfiled, and almost certainly incriminating, municipal reports. Her name was Ayumi Sato, and she was currently reclining in her battered office chair, headphones clamped over her ears, and a look of serene detachment on her face as she filed her toenails to the beat of Sparks’ “Left Out in the Cold.”
