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.
Read more about this topic: Global Garden
Famous quotes containing the word story:
“Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Its idea of “production value” is spending a million dollars dressing up a story that any good writer would throw away. Its vision of the rewarding movie is a vehicle for some glamour-puss with two expressions and eighteen changes of costume, or for some male idol of the muddled millions with a permanent hangover, six worn-out acting tricks, the build of a lifeguard, and the mentality of a chicken-strangler.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“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 (1892–1983)