"Were Sapporo's cherry blossoms about to fade too..."
Early that morning, in a corner of Wild Bamboo Hat Mountain Forest Park on the southwestern outskirts of Sapporo City, Hokkaido, a petite girl with skin so white it was almost translucent crawled out of her camping tent and gazed at the few cherry blossoms remaining on a nearby branch.
It was already nearly mid-May. The Cherry Blossom Front had reached chilly Hokkaido at the beginning of the month, and after the bustle of Golden Week in May, Hokkaido's cherry blossoms were gradually fading too.
Yamanashi Inaba liked cherry blossoms.
What particularly delighted Yamanashi Inaba about coming to Hokkaido from Tokyo was being able to enjoy the cherry blossoms.
For that reason, once the Cherry Blossom Front reached Hokkaido, she had simply set up camp in Wild Bamboo Hat Mountain Forest Park.
Though breathtakingly beautiful in bloom, cherry blossoms lasted only a very short time-a week at most, or just two or three days. They were fragile too. Once battered by wind and rain, their petals would fall and drift away on the wind.
In full bloom, the cherry blossoms clustered in a dazzling spectacle, but when they faded, they did so without lingering. Overnight, all their splendor fell away, untouched by dust or mud, elegant and pure, looking especially magnificent and poignantly beautiful.
Beautiful yet fleeting, cherry blossoms possessed the melancholy beauty of impermanence, just like her former self.
In the past, Yamanashi Inaba had viewed cherry blossoms with a tendency toward self-pity and even self-destruction. But things were different now. After being reborn that night, she could finally settle her mind and appreciate their brilliant beauty.
The May mornings in Sapporo, Hokkaido, still carried a chill, but that was hardly a problem for Yamanashi Inaba, whose constitution was already supernatural.