June rode her grandmother’s bicycle, now sporting a new chain. With Chiharu on university break, they tagged along to Satoshi’s gigs. One day they drove to a music festival, driving on winding mountain roads. June had no idea where they were. They passed a convoy of military vehicles carrying self-defence force cadets in camouflage gear to a remote spot for training exercises. At length, a sign declared they were entering Jamaica Village. It didn’t seem to June like this should be real, but people were wandering around in rasta hats and dreadlocks, and dancing to a line-up of reggae and ska bands. This was nothing like the performances at the Hit Parade, nothing at all like the music of her childhood, the singing of songs backed by digital piano.

The humidity was oppressive. When the weather broke and it started raining, the guitarists stepped back under the cover of the half-roof over the stage, but the band continued playing, and the dancers kept dancing. Water streamed off faces and brass instruments. June was dancing too, moving with the others, swept up in a shared cathartic joy.

She thought of Naomi more often as the weeks passed by. She knew very well she’d made things hard for her sister by leaving. June, being older, had always been the one who got them into trouble; this was how it had been since they were small. There was the time they were punished for sneaking out and playing chicken with cars out on the road and were shut in a storeroom overnight by the furious leaders. Their mother was incensed, dragging them by the wrists to the storeroom herself. ‘You could have been killed! Or caused an accident!’

But it had been worth it, for June at least. There was something thrilling about standing in the middle of the road and watching the cars brake, watching the drivers’ stricken faces. The act was dizzyingly close to waving down a ride, something she always stopped just short of actually doing. She wondered later about those people she saw behind the windscreens, about the lives they had, the jobs they went to, their families and their innermost desires, the songs they played while driving to wherever they were going.

Naomi blamed June for the punishment, and that was fair enough. ‘I hate you,’ Naomi told her. ‘Why do you have to break the rules?’ And June had felt guilty the whole night they sat in that storeroom, among the boxes of dried goods, broomsticks and dust. After that, they were enemies, then allies, then enemies by turns. Naomi never let herself be persuaded to sneak out again. She stuck to the straight and narrow, and that was fair enough as well.