Summary

A year after learning of her parents’ deaths, Chiyo is almost twelve and is beginning to look less like a child and more like a young woman. One night, she dreams of a bearded man. Though she didn’t understand the dream, she feels it is important somehow. She remembers a moth that had landed on her in her early days at the okiya, and she retrieves it from the piece of cloth she had entombed it in beneath the house. It still looks as it did that day, but when she touches it, it turns to dust. At that moment, with new awareness that her life was forward and not back, Auntie calls her to return two hair ornaments to Hatsumomo at the school as well as completing some other errands. When she drops them off to her, Hatsumomo takes an opportunity...