The Girl by the Window Only Answers in Haiku, So I—an Exchange Student Who Can't Read the Air—Joined Her Dying Literature Club

Sardor Aliev is sixteen, 186 centimetres tall, and six thousand kilometres from home. He has come from Tashkent to spend one school year, April to March, at Shirahama High, a small school on a hill above the sea, a train ride from Kamakura. He has a green textbook, a suitcase of dried apricots, and one of his grandmother's proverbs for every occasion. What he doesn't have is the ability to "read the air". His host sister is twelve and merciless. His indoor shoes are two sizes too small. And the girl by the window, Kotone Shirase, the last member of the dying Literature Club, doesn't speak. She answers his questions on pale-blue sticky notes. In haiku.

So Sardor buys the only sticky notes left at the konbini (neon orange) and starts writing back: badly, then better. Three members by the culture festival, or the club is gone. One school year, and then he is. Between the rainy season and the summer fireworks, between a pot of plov and the first sunrise of the year, he will have to learn what no textbook teaches: how to hear what someone says in seventeen syllables, and how to answer out loud.