Chapter 5

CHAPTER FOUR A 100% Sunshine Girl Eyewitness Account A— K_ko (age 26), housewife, resident of Koutou Ward, Tokyo It really isn’t a big deal—certainly not enough to go out of your way to tell people about. My son is still only four, and I’m sure he sometimes has trouble telling the difference between fantasy and reality. But—yes. I saw them, too. Or I felt like I did. Yes, of course. I’ll start at the beginning, then. —The weather that day? Rainy, obviously. I mean, it’s been raining for ages, hasn’t it? The bad weather started long before this summer, but that day, it was especially nasty with all that wind and lightning. We’re on the thirty-eighth floor—yes, our building’s a high-rise—and the view is amazing in a storm. The rain clouds rushing at the windows look like CG straight out of a movie, and you can see lightning strike the building. Because of the weather, preschool was closed, and my son was home. I was cooking, I think— Oh, what were we making? I’m pretty sure it was bagna càuda. No, not at all, it’s surprisingly simple! It goes well with wine, and it’s a hit with both men and women. Yes, that’s right. When us moms have our get-togethers, we take turns providing the food. If it’s too plain, everyone gets bored, and if it’s too fancy, people think you’re trying to say something, so bagna càuda is perfect. If you’ve got one nice centerpiece dish, then the whole thing is appealing even if the rest is only pasta or bread or Ritz crackers. Those of us in the mothers’ group tend to be rather conscious of one another that way. (Thirty minutes of talk about the mothers’ group follows.) Phew. So, what was it we were talking about? —Oh yes, of course! When the fish fell from the sky. I was in the middle of cooking, and my son started calling to me. “Mommy, fish!” I was focused on the food and not really paying attention, so I just said, “Ooh, neat.” He always figures out I’m busy and gives up when I do that. But that day, he tugged at my clothes. “Mommy, come here, there’s fish outside.” But of course that’s impossible, you know? We were on the thirty-eighth floor. Still, he’s almost never this pushy, so I went over to the window with him. “Where are the fish?” I asked, and he pointed at the narrow concrete ledge just outside the window. I looked closer, but all I saw was the rain splashing up. But my son kept asking. “Did you see them?” “Huh?” I said. “Look closer,” he said. “At the raindrops.” And I got this chill—I was a little scared, but I stared at the spray from the rain until I felt like I was falling into it. And then—I saw little fish, like killifish, in among the raindrops! Gave me goose bumps all over. …No, they weren’t actually fish; they were just rain. Just clear water shaped like tiny fish. But the way they hit the wall and jumped, it was like they were alive. That window is fixed, though, so I couldn’t open it, and when I watched them closely, they started to look like plain old raindrops. My son noticed, too. “Huh?” he said. “They went bye-bye…” That’s right; that’s why I said earlier that I only felt like I’d seen them, before. It truly doesn’t feel important enough to tell people about. My husband didn’t believe us at all. “That’s gestaltzerfall,” he said. “Sometimes words stop looking like words to me, too.” He sounded so proud of himself, even though this was something completely different. It’s a bit of a relief to have been able to talk to you about it. …Would you like to come over and have a girls’ night in with us sometime? Eyewitness Account B— Y_jiro (age 13), middle schooler, resident of Taitou Ward, Tokyo You sure you want to hear about it? I mean, obviously I don’t mind telling you; I’d been wanting to tell somebody anyway. The thing is, I’m not all that sure it really happened, and neither is he. Nobody else saw it, and the only thing I know for certain is that we both got soaked. That day, club had just ended, and I was getting ready to head home. Yeah, it’s summer vacation, but we still have club… Huh? What…? Uh, it doesn’t really matter which club, does it? …I mean, it’s the shogi club, but… Pfft, no way, girls don’t care at all if you do shogi in real life… You think? Uh, well, that’s kinda nice to hear. Anyway, I was in club, and my friend came into the room all excited. He was like, “Come look! I found something really cool!” He’s one of the more chill people in our class, so I was like, Huh, this is surprising. If he was saying it was cool, it probably was. I followed him, and we opened our umbrellas and ran along the railway tracks. “So what’s really cool?” I asked him, but he said he couldn’t explain it, and I’d have to see it to understand. We went into an alley that was only wide enough for one car. There were buildings under construction on either side, covered with sound reduction sheets, but nobody was around at all. “See? Right there!” My friend pointed up through the power lines at the clouds between the buildings. “Huh? C’mon, there’s nothing there.” “No, there is! Look closer!” He was so intense about it, I figured I might as well. So I started staring at the sky, and then something seemed…off. After a little bit, I realized what it was. I could hear the rain, but there wasn’t any falling on us. It was like there was an invisible roof or something over the spot where we were. That was when I saw something moving, flickering in the sky—these little ring-shaped ripples. Ripples were appearing in the sky, then vanishing, as if we were looking up at the surface of a pool on a rainy day. “What is that…?!” I backed up a few steps, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it. As I did, the sky warped. It’s water, I thought. It was like…some huge thing made out of water was stuck between the buildings. “A fish?” my friend muttered next to me, and I thought so, too. It was shaped kinda like a dolphin or a whale. And the next instant, the water fish suddenly collapsed and fell on us. We were like, “Waugh!” It was a quick, heavy downpour, like a guerilla rainstorm times ten, or like we got teleported under a waterfall. By the time the water stopped, we were both drenched, and the ribs of our umbrellas were bent like they’d been hit by a big gust of wind. Whatever it was between the buildings was gone without a trace except for a faint mist around us. —So, well, in the end, it kinda just feels like we ran into some crazy rain, and that was it. There’s no proof anywhere, and I haven’t told anybody. I tried to make it sound like a joke in that little blurb I wrote online. Your DM kinda surprised me. …Um, do you work on TV, miss? Huh? You don’t? Well, it’s just, you’re really pretty and all… Hey, y’know, I just realized, I don’t think I’ve ever talked with a girl this long before. * * * Sunshine for you. I wrote the words in large letters in my notebook, drew a square frame below them, and wrote in 5,000 yen. After giving it a little thought, I erased the 5, put in a 4, then erased that. “Would that be too expensive…?” Hmm. What should I do? An old-fashioned CRT TV sat on the bar counter, and for the past little while, a weather announcer had been speaking on the fuzzy screen. “We’ve already recorded more than two months of rainy days in a row, and the forecast for the next month shows that heavy rains will continue. The Meteorological Agency has published a statement warning that this is an extremely anomalous situation and has called for utmost caution regarding landslides—” “Say, Hodaka!” someone called cheerily, and I looked up from the notebook. Natsumi was sitting with her feet up on the sofa, hugging her knees, busy with a tablet. “This is really kind of amazing!” A roadside drainage ditch was studded with little milky-white somethings, about the size and shape of largish young sardines. The next photo was of a parking lot somewhere. Here, they were around the tires of the cars. After that was a photo a mother had taken of her daughter. The white things were scattered over the paving stones, and pigeons were pecking at them. The little girl was looking down at them from under an umbrella. “They do look a little like fish, maybe, but…” I zoomed in on the photo. “…These things fell out of the sky, with the rain?” All the photos that had been posted to social media had captions to that effect. “But they’re just photos, and there’s no proof, right?” “If you touch them, they disappear. Look.” Natsumi replayed a video someone had uploaded. It showed a lump a couple of inches long, with a surface like dried jelly. The finger of the person taking the movie entered the screen, then touched the lump, gingerly—and with a faint plish, the thing turned into water and flowed away. “Whoa!” I yelped. Natsumi continued excitedly. “You remember what that guy from the university said when we interviewed him earlier? The world of the sky is far deeper and stranger than the ocean. Humans have only seen a tiny bit of it directly, and a single cumulus cloud is its own kind of ‘world.’ A cloud several miles in size holds enough water to fill a lake and countless organisms inside it. There’s plenty of sunlight and water and organic stuff in a huge space where nobody messes with it. Down in the ocean where the light doesn’t reach, there are all kinds of unique creatures, so it wouldn’t be weird at all to find new, undiscovered ecosystems in the sky. He said it made no sense to assume the sky and the biological world are totally separate!” Natsumi went on and on in a rush, and I was startled by both her memory and her enthusiasm. “So there really must be something in the sky!” “And it’s these fish?” “Maybe! Well? Isn’t that amazing?!” “Then—” In spite of myself, I started thinking hard. Then— “If we made an article about that, we could make some real money! The urban legends feature is over, but if we do a feature on cryptids soon, we could—” “Huh?” Natsumi’s voice was icy. “Huh?” I broke off. “What do you mean, ‘We could make money’? The important thing is whether people think it’s interesting, right?” “Huh…” “Kid, you’re sounding more and more like Kei.” “Huh?” “I bet you’re gonna grow up to be so boring.” “Huh?!” Natsumi got up from the sofa, briskly tying her long hair back with an elastic. “Better not talk like that around the sunshine girl you finally managed to find, or she might not like you so much anymore. You’ve got a date today, right?” “Huh? No, it’s not a date or anything; it’s more like I’m making sure… Or apologizing, or…making a suggestion…” As I faltered, Natsumi pulled on a black suit jacket, so that she looked (unusually for her) like a sharp working adult. She always wore casual clothes that exposed a lot of arm and leg, so she seemed almost like a different person now. “Huh? What’s the occasion, Ms. Natsumi?” “I’m going job hunting.” “Huh?!” Job hunting?! “—Wait, what about the office?!” “This is just a temp thing until I find something better,” she replied, and I could tell that wasn’t the whole story. She fluttered a hand at me and left the office. I stared at the door she’d disappeared through, stunned, suddenly feeling left behind. No, she has to be joking, right? I thought hastily. “Wait, I’ve gotta go, too!” I said aloud to erase the slight unease I felt, then got up from the sofa. Believe it or not, the girl didn’t have a smartphone or a cell phone. As a result, she’d given me only a small handwritten note. Checking the directions she’d carefully printed by hand, I got off at Tabata Station. When I climbed the stairs at the end of the platform, as the instructions had told me to, I found a small unmanned ticket gate with a row of just three turnstiles. I’d had the idea that all ticket gates on the Yamanote Line were as spacious as tennis courts and as crowded as a party, and the hush at this one startled me. I went through the gate, opened my umbrella, and started walking over the wet black asphalt. A narrow hill road stretched straight ahead, and although I walked for about five minutes, the only people I passed were two elderly women. On my right was a row of lush green cherry trees, and on the left, a vast landscape below me. Several rails ran in rows; beyond them were the elevated Shinkansen tracks, and beyond those, rain-wet buildings seemed to go on forever. The view was gray, but today, I could see subtle hints of color. Ever since that day when I’d seen the sunshine girl—when I’d seen the true Tokyo shining vivid in the sunlight—all the colors I saw seemed slightly more saturated. It felt as if my eyes were new somehow, or as if someone had secretly upgraded the display. Her apartment building turned out to be pretty old, with ivy climbing all over it. According to the note, Hina’s room was the last one on the second floor. At the top of the iron stairs, I could see a distant elevated Shinkansen track. A green train was sliding along it with a soft hiss. In front of the door, I took a deep breath, then knocked. “Wait—” All of a sudden, I realized something important. “Is this…?” Rain pattered lazily against the thin roof of the shared corridor. “Is this my first time going to a girl’s house?!” Click. Just then, the door opened, and Hina poked her head out. “Hi, Hodaka.” “Huh, whuh, agh!” “I bet you had trouble finding the place, didn’t you?” “N-no, uh, here! It’s not much, but—!” Hastily, I held out a plastic bag with both hands. “Wow, that was nice of you! Thanks!” Hina took it, smiling, then opened the door wider to invite me in. I awkwardly took off my shoes in the smallest entryway I’d ever seen. The apartment was overflowing with color. There was a little kitchen just beyond the entryway, with a living room about 140 square feet or so beyond it, and one more room beyond that. It was a cozy little floor plan, meant for a family. Each room was partitioned off by multicolored quilt curtains and decorated with small pictures and animal figurines, and colorful fabric hung in the windows as well. There was a round wooden window in the living room, with strings of transparent glass beads hanging in it like a sort of suncatcher. I sat huddled up at the low tea table in the living room. “Hodaka, have you had lunch already?” Hina called to me, clattering around in the kitchen. “Not yet…,” I said, then immediately realized she might be planning to feed me and yelled, “Oh! But don’t worry about it.” Hina giggled and told me, “It’s fine—just sit. Mind if I use these, Hodaka?” When I looked, she was holding the potato chips and chicken ramen I’d bought for her. At a convenience store on the way here, I’d stressed and stressed about what to buy; I’d finally asked on Yahoo! Answers and bought what the first answer said. Now that I thought about it, potato chips aside, I didn’t know why they suggested chicken ramen. “Huh? Of course, if you’ve got a way to use them!” “Thanks!” Use them? …In cooking? It seemed like a kind of embarrassing question, so for the moment, to help myself calm down, I looked around the room again. The suncatcher in the window swayed in the breeze, reflecting the weak light it had gathered from the rainy sky and casting a faint pattern. The sliding doors over the closet had been removed, and the shelves inside were being used as a built-in bookshelf. She had everything: picture books and educational magazines, light novels and comics, and even thick hardcovers. A small electric sewing machine sat in the corner of the living room, and I thought, I bet most of the decorations in here are handmade. Strangely, even though the tiny space was bursting with things, it didn’t seem cluttered at all. The place was full of delight, as if the room enjoyed being itself. “…Hina, do you live by yourself?” “With my little brother. Things happened.” “Huh…” Things. I couldn’t bring myself to ask further, but the thought that they might not have parents flickered through my mind. She was cheerfully snipping leaves that looked like sprouts with kitchen shears. Is that a kitchen garden? I thought. She really was a do-it-yourself type. As Hina bustled around, I watched her stealthily out of the corner of my eye. She was wearing a pale-yellow sleeveless pullover and sky-blue shorts. Her hair hung softly over her shoulders—in twin ponytails, like always. Now that I was paying attention, she was surprisingly thin. Natsumi wore sleeveless tops and shorts all the time, too, but that was completely different. “What about you, Hodaka? Why did you run away?” “Um…” The unexpected question left me at a loss. “Well, I just sort of…” I hastily groped around for a reason, tried to put it into words, but the only ones I found were simple and dumb. “It was suffocating… The place where I lived, and my parents. And I’d kinda dreamed of coming to Tokyo…” As soon as I said it aloud, I was embarrassed by how ridiculously childish it sounded. “No real reason,” I added hurriedly. “I see.” Hina’s brief reply wasn’t affirmation or denial. She just said it with a smile. She broke an egg, separating the yolk and the white into different dishes with a practiced hand, then scrambled them briskly. She poured a quick drizzle of oil into a hot frying pan, and the scent of sesame oil and ginger soon followed. Taking cold rice out of the fridge, she dumped it into the pan and began to stir-fry it, creating a delicious-sounding sizzle. Still plying it with the wooden spoon, Hina asked me another question. “You don’t need to go back?” “…I don’t want to.” There was no other way to put it, so I just said what I was feeling. “I see.” Hina opened the bag of potato chips, crunched them up with her hands, then mixed them into the contents of the frying pan. “Thanks for waiting!” Hina called in a singsong voice, carrying the food over on a tray. “Whoa!” I yelped. On top of each heaping helping of fried rice with potato chips, there was a glossy raw egg with a circle of little leaves around it. The salad on the big platter had large chunks of broken chicken ramen noodles in it. “It’s called—um, bean-sprout potato-chip fried rice with sesame oil, aaand super-crunchy chicken salad!” “Woooow…!” I was impressed; she’d come up with something original just like that. I was starving now. Abruptly clapping her hands in realization, Hina stood up. “Oh! The onions!” From the kitchen, she brought a glass with a thick tassel of green onions growing in it. She snipped away at them with the shears, letting the bits fall into the Chinese soup she had also made. The chunks of fluffy white fish floating in it were joined by flecks of bright green. “—So, how have things been since you came to Tokyo?” Hina asked suddenly. “Huh? Oh…” Again, I said what I was feeling. “Well, it’s…easier to breathe now.” Hina looked at me and beamed. “I see! That’s kinda nice to hear. Okay, let’s eat for real this time!” We folded our hands and spoke in unison: “Thanks for the food.” I used my spoon to break the egg yolk, then shoveled a big spoonful of rice and bean sprouts and potato chips into my mouth. After I’d cleaned my plate, I realized the record for “best thing I’d ever eaten” had been broken twice this month, and thanks to the same girl both times. “Hodaka, are you serious about this?” Hina was looking dubiously at my notebook. I’d written Sunshine for you in big letters and made notes on design suggestions, how to submit a request, and a rate schedule below it. This was a blueprint for my idea: the “Sunshine Girl Business” website. After we’d finished eating, I’d set the iPad I’d brought from the office on the table, and now pencils, erasers, label tags, and other writing materials were scattered around it. The iPad screen displayed a mock-up I’d created in an app. “Well, you are a real sunshine girl, right, Hina?” I asked, just to be sure. “Yes.” “You can make it sunny just by praying to the sky.” “Yes.” She nodded, as if that was nothing. “Then—” “No, listen!” she interrupted. “What if we do this and the sun doesn’t come out?” “You can’t do it?” I challenged. “I can so!” “Then let’s do it! You need a job, right?” “Well, yeah, but…I’m not so sure about taking money for this…,” Hina mumbled, picking at a mini shortcake from the convenience store. I watched her out of the corner of my eye. “And anyway…,” I began. She looked so young; I really would never have guessed she was older than me. Her neck was thin, her arms were delicate, her body was fragile, her hips were weak, and her legs had nothing on Natsumi’s. “You don’t look like you could make it working in a nightclub, Hina.” “Huh?” Hina’s hand stopped picking at the cake. “Hmm?” “Hodaka…” She slowly drew away from me. “What?” “What exactly are you looking at?!” “I’m not looking at anything!” I answered on reflex, starting to sweat. “Hrm…” Hina glared at me suspiciously. Crud. She knows. I’d heard about how girls always know when a guy is watching—that was true? Should I apologize? “I’m sorry…” My voice was small, and this time, Hina gave a musical laugh. I couldn’t tell if she’d actually been mad at all or if she’d been teasing me; the emotions I saw on her face were constantly changing, like some sort of puzzle I was struggling to decipher. She was like a blast from a rainbow-colored storm. “Huh? Hey, don’t you think five thousand yen is too much?” Hina said, holding the iPad. “Huh? You think so, too?” I selected the text and reentered the numbers. “You want to make it about three thousand?” “Hmm… On the other hand, I have to make a living from it…” Hina typed in 3,500, and I cut in. “Wait, but if it’s too cheap, it’ll look fake… What if we went crazy and made it a thing for rich people? Fifty thousand yen per request!” “I’d hate it! No way!” As we argued about this and that, we got more and more into making the site. “Actually, maybe we should only make people pay if it works,” I suggested. “True. And use discretionary pricing.” “What about making the first time free and trying for word-of-mouth advertising?” “That could work. No, but again, I’ve gotta make a living…” “The site’s a little plain. Maybe it needs a picture or something.” “Oh, I’ll draw one!” “Huh? What is this? …A hippo?” “…Uh, it’s a frog.” “Huh? For real?” Before I knew it, it was dark outside. Through the window, I could see the lights of a distant Shinkansen. “—It’s done!” We yelled in unison. The finished website had a big picture of a sun and the words Sunshine for you! in colorful characters. A pink frog in a yellow raincoat said 100% Sunshine Girl! in a speech balloon. Beside it was a cart icon that showed a 3,400-yen price, tax included, and a request form with fields for Desired date and time, Desired location for sun, E-mail address, and Reason you want sun. Hovering my finger over the app’s PUBLISH icon, I told her, “Okay, I’m uploading it. Ready?” Just then, there was a click as the door to the apartment opened. “I’m hooome. Hey, Sis, sardines were cheap today, so I… Hmm? Who’re you?” The boy standing there frowning at me was a grade-schooler wearing a school backpack and carrying a supermarket bag. “Huh…?” I said in spite of myself. “Oh, hey, you’re the—” He had a silky short bob, sharp eyes, and childlike but symmetrical features—this was the kid with all the girlfriends on the bus that time. “Huh? Hey, what’s going on? Do you two know each other?” Hina asked. “I saw him on the bus a while back—” “Hmm.” Hina placed herself between us, taking charge, and briskly introduced us to each other, complete with gestures. “Hodaka, this is my little brother, Nagi. Nagi, this is Hodaka. He’s my business partner!” “Huh?” Nagi looked even more perplexed, and just then— Ting-a-ling. The iPad chimed. I glanced at the screen, then did a double-take. “Oh, crap, we actually got a request!” “What?! You already uploaded it?!” “Well, I mean— Whoa, and it’s for tomorrow!” “Huh? Wait, hang on a second, we’re actually doing this?!” The TV happened to be in the middle of the weather forecast, and the woman on the screen was smoothly announcing tomorrow’s predictions. “We’ll be seeing rain over a wide area again tomorrow.” “But it’ll be raining!” Hina shrieked. “Well, yeah! Otherwise, there’s no point!” I yelled back. “Agh, what do I do?! I’m getting nervous… Hey, what kind of request is it? It’s a little one, right? From a kid or something?” “Um…it says they want you to make it sunny for a flea market.” “Oh my god, it’s serious!” We flailed around, getting more and more frantic. Nagi just put the groceries into the fridge, watching us out of the corner of his eye. “What now? What now? What now?” Hina was saying to me. I had to do something before she burst into tears, and I desperately forced myself to act. “Hina, it’ll be fine—I’ll help out!” “How?!” “Don’t worry; just leave it to me!” Okay! I resolved. I’ll be working super-late tonight. * * * The next morning was rainy, of course. “Hina, use this!” I held a yellow umbrella out to her as she stepped into the corridor from her apartment. “Huh? What is it?” “Open it!” With a rustle, Hina opened the umbrella, and sunshine talisman dolls tumbled out. Each of the umbrella’s eight ribs had a pair of them tied to it. This was my sunshine girl umbrella with a total of sixteen sunshine dolls. One of my best works, if I did say so myself. “—Sorry, I don’t need this.” Hina shut the umbrella with a click. “Huh?!” Ouch! No, wait! “Hey, hold on! I’ve got something else for you!” I pointed to the stairs. Clack, clack, clack. Footsteps were coming closer. A character suit of an enormous sunshine doll, about four and a half feet tall, stepped into view. Another one of my best works, if I did say so myself. “—Sorry, I don’t need that, either.” “Huh?!” “Screw you, Hodaka!” Nagi yanked the head off the costume and yelled at me, his face bright red. The flea market was in Odaiba, along a gorgeous promenade that ran between the Fuji TV building and the Hilton hotel. You could shoot a TV drama here. Rows of tents had been set up, and a few shoppers with umbrellas were circulating among them. The three of us stood on an observation platform that projected out into Tokyo Bay, desperately praying to the sky. Of course, calling down fair weather was Hina’s job, but in an attempt to provide a little support, I was spinning the sunshine doll umbrella, and Nagi (in addition to being a very good sport) was in the costume, running circles around Hina. So we had a high school girl calling herself a sunshine girl, a high school guy waving an umbrella with sixteen sunshine dolls hanging from it, and a grade school boy running around in a white character costume in some strange approximation of a dance. Our ceremony probably came across as really sketchy. I heard a whispered conversation from the tent of the flea market’s sponsor, who was also our client. “Who invited that crew?” “Oh, well, it was just superstition. I thought we might get lucky…” “Hey, kids!” an older guy shouted at us. “That’s about enough, all right?” “Just a little longer!” I called back, but my anxiety and worry grew. “Hina, you want some water?” “Sis, have some candy!” We were starting to get stressed out, but Hina ignored us and prayed desperately, her hands clasped and sweat running down her face. And then it happened. “You’re kidding! It cleared up!” Hearing a voice from the sponsor’s tent, I looked up at the sky. A small gasp left my mouth. The thick clouds had parted, and the bright sun was shining through. Up until a little bit ago, it had been almost chilly for July, but now the temperature was rising rapidly. The gray ocean turned a vivid blue, the Rainbow Bridge shone white, and every single car that drove across it gleamed happily. “How was that?” Hina was out of breath after running over to the sponsor’s tent, but she sounded triumphant. “Boy, was that a shock!” “You kids are incredible. You actually are a real live sunshine girl!” The people walking along the promenade closed their umbrellas and looked up at the sky, savoring the first sunburst in a long time. “Pretty impressive, even if it was just a coincidence!” proclaimed the old guy, who I assumed was in charge. “It wasn’t a coincidence!” the giant sunshine doll protested, and I restrained him, smiling. “Here, will twenty thousand yen do?” the old guy said, putting the money in Hina’s hand. “Huh?! That’s too much!” “Consider it a bonus, young lady, for being so darn cute!” “That’s sexual harassment, Boss. I mean, yeah, she is cute, but still.” “No, but if you look at sales when it’s rainy versus when it’s sunny, it’s like night and day. Twenty thousand is almost peanuts.” “I had some serious doubts at first, but these kids are really amazing.” “That sunshine doll is adorable. Did you make it yourself?” Everyone was praising us, praising Hina. It was hard to say whether they actually believed in the Sunshine Girl, but I could tell they were all really happy. We walked through the bustling flea market, stopping in front of the Yurikamome station. We looked at one another. The nervousness we’d felt when we were here that morning already seemed like something from the distant past, and we couldn’t hide the joy welling up from deep inside us. “We did it!!” The three of us jumped into the air, exchanging high fives. We laughed together with total abandon. The passersby were side-eyeing us, wondering what was going on, but the sunburst had put smiles on their faces, too. “That was fantastic, Sis!” “Yes, I think I can do this!” “Okay, let’s get some money with the weather!” “Yeah!” The three of us punched the air. …And that was how our “sunshine business” began.