When the Stars Fall, An Eternal Echo Blooms in the Eyes

Amid Tokyo's steel-and-concrete jungle, there are buildings that weep.

Chiuha Hoshina, a regular on the rooftop of private Hoshimi Academy, can see the "colors of sorrow" in the city with her right eye. Abandoned old school buildings, train stations caught in an endless midnight loop, and a mysterious kitchen that forever smells of baked apple pie are all "residual images of the heart," formed from intense human emotions. A purifier bearing a star-shaped birthmark, she travels between reality and memory with handmade starry-sky lollipops. Yet in every tearful moment, she hears her own name in the buildings' heartbeat.

"How many more times are you going to repeat a rescue that's doomed to fail?" asks Kiriko Kujo, a black-haired girl who always appears out of nowhere. Her pocket watch holds the memories of 37 worldlines. When Hoshina discovers yearbook photos of past students who look exactly like her, when a boy from the astronomy club photographs a nonhuman silhouette in her shadow, and when victims who should be strangers whisper nicknames she ought to have forgotten, the past that was deliberately erased gradually comes to light, along with the clocktower of interlocking gears appearing above Tokyo.

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.