“It's Mari's favorite—chicken curry!” she said.

As soon as I'd sat down I passed the large, ribbon-wrapped package over to Mari. “It's a present. I had a bit of a windfall today.”

For some entirely obscure reason my father started clapping.

Mari grinned, narrowing her eyes ever so slightly.

“I feel like it's my birthday,” she said.

* * *

The rain turned to snow and quietly began to pile up.

Mari said she'd sleep with me in my room, so I suggested that maybe we could go to sleep in the guest room instead, playing video games.

She sat on top of her futon, which was right next to mine, looking warm and cozy in the blue pajamas I'd given her. The room was quite dark, and only the world beyond the window, that world of tumbling snow, looked white. The light from the television flickered down onto our futons. The newscaster was saying that there would be heavy snowfall in Tokyo again overnight.

“It's funny, it didn't snow at all last year,” I said.

“Didn't it? I was so completely out of it that I don't remember.” Mari smiled. “This sure has been a strange year. Like a dream. I wonder—do you think maybe my condition has improved a bit since last year?”

“It sure looks that way,” I said, laughing.

“I mean, what was he?” Mari said.

She was talking about my brother.

“I don't think he was actually human. I really don't,” I replied, investing these words with as much meaning as possible. Of course he was nothing more than one vibrantly charismatic young man, but since his death was so sudden and meaningless, and because until he died he'd made life as enjoyable as he possibly could, his existence had taken on a peculiar meaning.

“Now, whenever I think about my brother I start feeling really weird, sort of dazzled. I think about how his face looked when he smiled, and of his voice, and of the way his face looked when he was asleep . . . and I start to wonder if he was ever really here, you know, and if he was, it seems like maybe his being here was something irreplaceable—that's how I feel.”

“You too?” Mari said.

“And Sarah too, I bet.”

“Everyone who knew him.”

Was Mari the winner, or Sarah? For a moment I considered this question very seriously. But it was hard to say who had come out ahead. Thanks to Yoshihiro they'd each arrived at places they'd never anticipated.

“During this past year I spent a lot of time wondering how on earth I got to be where I was,” Mari said. “It seems like after I fell in love at the airport that day I just noticed that I'd ended up like this, in this place. There was nothing left anywhere around me, there was nothing I could do but keep going—I was deep in the heart of night. Slowly I started to figure out where I could start to rebuild things, but there was nothing there. What sort of creature had Yoshihiro been? But no . . . that didn't mean anything either, there was no meaning. That thought is what made it possible for me to settle down and go to sleep.”