Everyone has their own special place, a place somewhere on Earth that is theirs and theirs alone—a magical place wherein dwell those important to them, those they love the most.
One such special place was a small valley amidst the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert, a magical setting out of bounds to anyone other than the person who created it, a little prince from an asteroid, a rose and a fox.
Another special place was the delightful riverbank shim- mering with the silvery undersides of willow leaves where, far from the dusty world of humans, a small water rat had made his spotless home and a faddish toad had his grand hall—and where, one summer’s night just before dawn, the water rat and his friend the mole heard the clear strains of a piper, and found themselves drawn along the river by the beauty of the music ultimately to encounter the luminous figure of Pan in the hush of daybreak.
My special place is a house built in the shade of a large zelkova tree, and home to a big boy, a younger boy and a very small girl of about five or six. The garden is a riot of fruit trees, apricots and chestnuts and figs and cherries.
On clear summer days when the afternoon sun floods the lawn with light, the children take out the hosepipe sprinkler to spray the lawn, and frolic about noisily under the shower of water. The boys are wearing black shorts and the girl a yellow swimsuit her mother made for her. Small rainbows dance over the green turf as the water sprays all around.
My younger self slips out of the house next door and sneaks into the garden. The older middle-school boy and the little girl wave to me in welcome, but the more reserved younger boy scowls. I suck in my breath, and charge into the spray of water. Oh, the wonder of a cold shower under the dazzling sun on a hot day! Intoxicated by summer, we roll around the lawn like young braves. The fragrance of wet grass, the sweet smell of damp earth… Finally the smaller boy pounces on me like a young bear and we start wrestling with all our might. The little girl’s eyes glitter merrily as an imp’s as she watches us, her happy laugh ringing high up in the branches of the big tree.
After a while the sky darkens and a real afternoon shower comes along, putting an end to our play. A loud clap of thunder rumbles through the sky, and the little girl and her two elder brothers vanish into the darkness. And so does my younger self.
It is always midsummer in my special place.
At times, little scamp that I am, I am up in the white fig tree in the girl’s garden. Playing the part of a robber, I clamber over our cypress hedge, climb the tree and move from one fruit to the next, milky-white sap seeping from the stalks as I pick them, devouring them greedily as I go. The air is filled with the fragrance of the fig leaves.
The little girl comes out of her quaint Western-style house.
Oh no! I hide my face under the big leaves, but she makes a beeline for the tree and politely calls up, “Pick one for me too!” The fearless robber is instantly transformed into an angel descended from heaven to pick a fig.
“Thank you!” she says gratefully and, skipping over the short shadows, goes back into the house.
My mind full of the girl with a slim neck and beads of sweat on her nose, I sit on my fig branch drawing a castle in the blue sky, a daydream castle where one day the girl and I will live together. As the big summer thunderclouds amass and begin to tower high, so too my castle spreads throughout the boundless blue sky.
In my own special place there is no little prince from a distant star, nor a pleasant riverbank from where sound the clear strains of Pan’s pipes. My special place is the house in Tokyo where I was born and grew up, which was destroyed in an air raid during the war. I can still recall how, when I joined the mass evacua- tion of primary school children leaving for the countryside, I kept looking back at it longingly over my shoulder as I was led away. No trace remains of that house now, nor of the house in the shade of the big zelkova tree next door. And I’ll probably never again get to meet that little imp of a girl who lived there. Or so I believed for over ten years, until one day I ran into an old friend by chance on the train and he happened to men- tion her to me. “She still remembers you, you know. She said she sometimes wishes she could meet up with that boy next door who was so good at the high bar. She sounded really quite
wistful.”
I was speechless. Paying me no heed, my friend went on, “It really took me back, talking about our childhood days with her. Although she didn’t say much, really. She’d probably have talked more if you’d been there. She always did seem to like you better than me.” As a boy he had always been kind, if a bit tactless, and he hadn’t changed in that respect. “Why don’t you pay her a visit? This is where she said she’s staying.” He wrote an address on a scrap of paper and passed it to me.
He seemed to want to carry on reminiscing and if I’m honest, I did want to hear more about what the girl was doing now. However, I just couldn’t bear the thought of someone else barging in on my special place, and so I took my leave of him. As I made my way home, I ripped up the scrap of paper he’d given to me into little pieces. I wanted to remain for ever the lively, wild boy doing endless spins up on the high bar the way she remembered me! And I wanted her always to be the little imp of a girl in my special place.
The tiny shreds of paper scattered in the breeze.
A few months later, I came across a small package in the mail at work one morning. As I turned it over to see the name of the sender, thinking it must be a submission from a reader, my hands started shaking. Written there in blue Magic Marker was: “Yuri Moriyama”, the name of the little girl in my special place.
I tore into the package, opened the large notebook and started reading. That little girl next door had had an altogether more magical place of her own! I felt I was being shown another, hitherto hidden, dimension to my own special place as I was drawn into her story.
Copyright © 2026 by Tomiko Inui. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
