“That will be a sign. Watch the sky with great care,” the small-voiced one says furtively. “Watch the sky with great care,” he says again. “Count the moons.”

“Ho ho,” says the keeper of the beat.

“Ho ho,” the other six join in.

The girl runs away.

There was something mistaken there. Something wrong. Something greatly misshapen. Something opposed to nature. The girl knows this. She does not know what the Little People want, but the image of herself inside the air chrysalis sends shivers through her. She cannot possibly live with her living, moving other self. She has to run away from here. As soon as she possibly can. Before her dohta wakes up. Before that second moon appears in the sky.

In the Gathering it is forbidden for individuals to own money. But the girl’s father once secretly gave her a ten-thousand-yen bill and some coins. “Hide this so that no one can find it,” he told her. He also gave her a piece of paper with someone’s name, address, and telephone number written on it. “If you ever have to run away from this place, use the money to buy a train ticket and go there.”

Her father must have known back then that something bad might happen in the Gathering. The girl does not hesitate. Her actions are swift. She has no time to say good-bye to her parents.

From a jar she buried in the earth, she takes out the ten-thousand-yen bill and the coins and the paper. During class, she tells the teacher she is not feeling well and gets permission to go to the nurse’s office. Instead she leaves the school and takes a bus to the station. She presents her ten-thousand-yen bill at the window and buys a ticket to Takao, west of Tokyo. The man at the window gives her change. This is the first time in her life she has ever bought a ticket or received change or gotten on a train, but her father gave her detailed instructions, and she has memorized what she must do.

As indicated on the paper, the girl gets off the train at Takao Station on the Chuo Line, and she uses a public telephone to call the number her father gave her. The man who answers is an old friend of her father’s, an artist who paints in the traditional Japanese style. He is ten years older than her father and he lives in the hills with his daughter near Mount Takao. His wife died a short time before. The daughter is named Kurumi and she is one year younger than the girl. As soon as he hears from the girl, the man comes to get her at the station, and he warmly welcomes this young escapee into his home.

The day after she is taken into the painter’s home, the girl looks at the sky from her room and discovers that the number of moons up there has increased to two. Near the usual moon a smaller second moon hangs like a slightly shriveled green pea. My dohta must have awakened, the girl thinks. The two moons cast the shadow of her heart and mind. Her heart gives a shudder. The world has changed. And something is beginning to happen.

The girl hears nothing from her parents. Perhaps no one in the Gathering has noticed her disappearance. That is because her other self, her dohta, has remained behind. The two of them look exactly alike, so most people can’t tell the difference. Her parents, of course, should be able to tell that the dohta is not the actual girl, that she is nothing but the girl’s other self, that their actual daughter has run away from the Gathering, leaving the dohta behind in her place. There is only one place where the girl might have gone, but still her parents never try to contact her. This in itself might be a wordless message to the girl to stay away.

The girl goes to school irregularly. The new outside world is simply too different from the world of the Gathering where she grew up. The rules are different, the aims are different, the words they use are different. For this reason, she has trouble making friends in this new world. She can’t get used to life in the school.

In middle school, however, she befriends a boy. His name is Toru. He is small and skinny, and his face has several deep wrinkles like that of a monkey. He seems to have suffered from a serious illness when little and can’t participate in strenuous activities. His backbone is somewhat curved. At recess time, he always stays by himself, reading a book. Like the girl, he has no friends. He is too small and too ugly. During one lunch break, the girl sits next to him and starts to talk to him. She asks about the book he is reading. He reads it aloud to her. She likes his voice, which is small and hoarse but very clear to her. The stories he tells with that voice all but carry her away. He reads prose so beautifully that it sounds as if he is reciting poetry. Soon she is spending every lunchtime with him, sitting very still and listening with deep attention to the stories he reads her.

Before long, however, Toru is lost to the girl. The Little People snatch him away from her.

One night an air chrysalis appears in Toru’s room. The Little People make it bigger and bigger each night while he sleeps, and they show the scene to the girl through her dreams. The girl can do nothing to stop them. Eventually the chrysalis reaches full size and a vertical split appears in its side, just as it happened with the girl. But inside this chrysalis are three big, black snakes. The three snakes are tightly intertwined, so tightly that no one—including themselves—can pull them apart. They look like a shiny perpetual tangle with three heads. The snakes are terribly angry that they cannot pull free. They writhe in a frantic effort to separate themselves from each other, but the more they writhe, the more entangled they become. The Little People show these creatures to the girl. The boy called Toru sleeps on beside them, unaware. Only the girl can see all this.

The boy suddenly falls ill a few days later and is sent to a distant sanatorium. The nature of his illness is not disclosed. In any case, Toru will surely never return to the school. He has been irretrievably lost.

The girl realizes that this is a message from the Little People. Apparently they cannot do anything to the girl, a maza, directly. What they can do instead is harm and even destroy the people around her. But they cannot do this to just anyone—they cannot touch her guardian, the painter, or his daughter, Kurumi. Instead they choose the weakest ones for their prey. They dragged the three black snakes from the depths of the boy’s mind and woke them from their slumber. By destroying the boy, they have sent a warning to the girl and are trying their best to bring her back to her dohta. “You, finally, are the one who caused this to happen,” they are telling her.

The girl returns to her loneliness. She stops going to school. Making friends with someone can only expose that person to danger. That is what it means to live beneath two moons. That is what she has learned.

The girl eventually makes up her mind and begins fashioning her own air chrysalis. She is able to do this. The Little People said that they had come to her world down a passageway from the place they belong. If that is the case, she herself should be able to go to that place down a passageway in the opposite direction. If she goes there, she can learn the secrets regarding why she is here and what the meaning of “maza” and “dohta” could be. She might also succeed in saving the lost Toru. The girl begins making a passageway. All she has to do is pluck threads from the air and weave a chrysalis. This will take time, but if she does take the time, she can do it.

Sometimes, however, she becomes unsure and confusion overtakes her. Am I really a maza? Couldn’t I have switched places somewhere with my dohta? The more she thinks about it, the less certain she becomes. How can I prove that I am the real me?