12

"It was one of those early autumn afternoons when the light is sharp and clear, exactly as it had been a year earlier when I had visited Naoko in Kyoto. The clouds were white and narrow as bones, the sky wide open and high. The fragrance of the breeze, the tone of the light, the presence of tiny flowers in the grass, the subtle reverberations that accompanied sounds: all these told me that autumn had come again, increasing the distance between me and the dead with each cycle of the seasons. Kizuki was still seventeen, and Naoko twenty-one, forever."