That had been the most stunning thing about getting here, she noted as she climbed the steep hill with slow, trudging steps. Not how her apartment had been full of pastel plastics with bizarre uses. Not how the neighbors had left a package full of soap and laundry detergent on her stoop. It was the sheer number of torii. Not that every place was like Fushimi Inari, with hundreds and hundreds. But here, there was another, wedged between two modest homes. And earlier there had been one sitting in the middle of a rice field, like it was a lone boat on the ocean. And another greeted her across the road from the train station, next to a hardware store. A hardware store, of all places! Torii here, torii there. Sometimes not even on a full shrine. The one she was facing now was just a single altar by the roadside. Sometimes wood painted and shiny, sometimes plain gray stone. The country was speckled with torii like delicious candy-coated freckles. Just seeing them gave Jane a boost, and she raised her chin defiantly as she ascended to the crest of the hill.
The school was a rickety building with two floors that looked like the slightest jarring would pancake them together. As Jane approached the grounds, the chicken-clucking of idle chatter from the endless folds of pleated skirts and dangling strands of hair hushed. Dozens of dark-eyed faces turned to her for a brief moment of incredulity, and then the schoolyard noise returned in earnest.
A boy with gel-spiked hair and drumsticks of arms poking through the threadbare elbows of his uniform fell into an easy glide next to her. “Harroh,” he said, grinning. His teeth were crooked.
“Hello,” Jane answered politely. She hovered in indecision for a moment, then decided to take advantage of his interest to ask directions to the principal’s office. “Kohchoh-sensei no jimusho wa doko deshou ka?”
This brought a gasp from the boy that faded into a croak as he opened his mouth too wide. Jane disregarded him and strode through the main entrance. She’d find it herself.
