Story
The story begins in Princeton, New Jersey, 1954, with Albert Einstein. Einstein is living in regret of his discovery of mass-energy equivalence (E = mc²), believing it led to the construction of the atomic bomb.
He meets two children, Hikaru and Haruhi, who can see the past and future in their dreams. They tell him that ever since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Yggdrasil, the tree of life, is dying.
However they discover that in the future there is a girl with special powers who saves the tree. Einstein then gives them drugs which slow their aging so they can meet this girl. He dies later the same day; April 18, 1955. He then becomes the story's disembodied narrator, following around the young boy Robin.
In Tokyo, 2005, Hikaru and Robin finally find the girl, Ruika. Ruika is pretending to be her young brother Masato, who died in an airplane crash, to keep her mother from grieving.
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Famous quotes containing the word story:
“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”
—Isak Dinesen (18851962)
“How else is the famous short story A study in Abjection to be understood but as an outbreak of disgust against an age indecently undermined by psychology.”
—Thomas Mann (18751955)
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (18921983)