The Girl Who Followed the Warm Wind

About this story

Old bell keeper Morio leads his granddaughter Yuki up the temple steps through falling snow for her first lesson, which is not striking but waiting. She counts her breath against the drifting flakes until the valley is ready, and when the one bronze note finally hums out over the rooftops, its long fade carries her, and the listener, down toward sleep.

The safety of being taught slowly by someone endlessly patient.

The bell is rung by the waiting, not by the striking.

Read the beginning

It was the blue hour, when the snow turns purple and the windows turn gold, and Hana and her little russet fox were the last two still out of doors. That was when the warm wind came sliding down off the great white mountain. It pulled at Hana's sleeve like a hand, and it carried a sound with it, thin and high and sad, from very, very far up. Hana went still. "Someone is up there," she whispered, "and they are cold."

Her mother called from the doorway that the mountain was far too big for a small girl in the dark. But Kon the fox was already at the gate, his nose to the wind and his ears turned toward that sad far sound. And Hana's heart was pounding. She wound her scarf twice around, and the two of them slipped out into the dusk, toward the mountain.

High above the steep white roofs, a glossy black raven turned one slow circle and fell in behind them, quiet as a shadow, the way it does when a story is about to begin.

The path climbed up through the snow-heavy pines. They passed a little stream frozen in the middle of its song, and icicles hanging like the teeth of a sleeping giant, and a family of deer who watched with soft dark eyes and did not run. Hana had never been so high, or so far from the warm gold windows of home. And still, from somewhere far above, that thin sad sound went on.

Higher, the trees gave out, and the world opened wide and blue and enormous. And there, near the very top, small against the huge cold sky, something was climbing. An old snow monkey, all alone, hauling himself up the frozen rocks, higher and higher, toward the first cold star.

"Why do you climb so high, old one?" Hana called up to him. The monkey did not stop. "The warmth," he rasped, and his voice was thin as paper. "All my long life I have felt it, somewhere far above me. Near the sky there must be a great warm fire. I have only to climb high enough."

But the higher the old monkey climbed, the colder the wind bit, and the more his tired red hands shook on the icy stone. And Hana saw the sad, strange truth of it: he had climbed so far up chasing a warmth above him that he had left the whole warm world, and everyone in it, far, far below.

Then the wind fell still, and the real cold came down, the cold of a mountain that does not love. The old monkey's strength ran out all at once. He clung to the bare black rock, too high and too weary to climb one more step, and too lost, now, to find his way back down.

Hana was cold too, so cold, and so far from the little lamp in her mother's window. Her eyes stung and filled. But when she thought of that warm window waiting for her down in the dark, something opened quietly in her chest, and all at once she understood exactly where the warmth had been all along.

The story goes on in the video.