I finished this slim little book in fragments, mostly on the way to and from work. It is under fifty thousand Chinese characters, light enough to carry around, and quiet enough that it almost seems to pass without incident.

The story is divided into four parts: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. It follows a year of ordinary days, beginning with Chizu moving into Ginko’s home and ending with her departure. There are no obvious dramatic turns, no grand rise and fall. The book is made almost entirely of small things.

But small things are not empty. Through them, something about young people today becomes visible: their confusion, their helplessness, their weakness.

In love, Chizu does not know why a relationship should continue, yet she cannot find a clear reason to end it either.

With family and elders, she does not know how to get along. She cannot express herself properly, so she chooses sarcasm instead, as if mockery were easier than honesty.

Sometimes rebellion does not come from not understanding. Sometimes it comes from understanding too much.

When we are young, we can rush forward recklessly and spend ourselves freely. Maybe that is why we keep circling back to questions about the meaning of life, again and again, as if there must be an answer hidden somewhere.

But is youth really so wonderful?

When we are young, we are often pessimistic. We waste time. We feel tired. Ginko says that this is because young people are always desperately reaching out, wanting something. As people grow older, there are fewer and fewer things they still want to reach for.

The young always want to become adults at once, to skip over the long, slow middle part called growing up. Only the old know that without going through it, there is no becoming.

The worst possibilities can all be imagined: a major earthquake, a great fire, a serious illness. A mother dies. Money runs out. There is no home to return to. No lover, no friends, no place of one’s own. In the end, all one can rely on is the heart and the body.

And even those cannot be trusted completely.

Still, even then, one has to find a way to go on living alone.

We often want someone else to tell us how a person is supposed to endure. In our own minds, we ask the same question over and over: can I really keep going like this?

But perhaps the process of recovering from a state we thought we could never escape is, in the end, always much the same. Without noticing, little by little, we come back.

Is the outside world cruel?

There is no inside and outside to the world. There is only one world.