“You came back,” she said, without turning.
Every spring, the people of Kamibashi whispered about the old sakura tree on the Hill of Forgotten Wishes. It stood alone, gnarled and patient, surrounded by mossy stones and the rusted echoes of childhood prayers. Most years, it offered nothing but bare branches and silence. But once every ten years—on the first night of a warm southern wind—it exploded into a cloud of pale pink, so thick and luminous that the entire hillside seemed to breathe.
Falling with the Sakura is a lyrical, haunting romance about love, loss, and the terrible beauty of things that were never meant to last.
A woman in a pale kimono, standing so still that Kaito mistook her for part of the tree. Her hair was the color of rain-soaked earth, and her eyes held the soft, unreadable sadness of petals about to fall.
Kaito had seen the bloom only twice in his life: once as a boy clutching his mother’s hand, and once as a teenager who pretended not to care about magic. Now, at twenty-two, he had returned to the town to bury his grandmother—and to finish a painting he could never quite complete.
She tilted her head. A cascade of petals sifted through her hair without touching her. “Everything under this tree falls, Kaito. That’s why it’s beautiful.”
