
Thirteen-year-old Yuki is hiding more and more of her true self to fit in after finding herself friendless and alone at the start of a new school year. She feels out of place with the popular crowd she has fallen in with, but her encounters with the mysterious new girl in her class help her to realize that her actions are not a response to peer pressure, but to rules she has set for herself, and she begins to free herself from them.
Summary
​Yuki starts eighth grade alone, separated from her only friend in the whole school. In the crucial first few days of the new school year, when peer groups and the layers of social stratification are formed, she feels lucky to be accepted, at least marginally, by the three most popular girls in her class. Yet, she constantly feels inferior and different, and she agonizes over every interaction. They are in the tennis club, she’s in the student council, and their lives and schedules are at odds.
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Home life is complicated, too. Her mother died four years earlier of a vascular disease, and although she has a good relationship with her father, she can’t bring herself to tell him she needs money for sanitary products or to ask him to buy them for her. As a result of her period poverty, she frequently visits the nurse’s office at school to ask for sanitary pads, and the nurse begins to call her out on her behavior.
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Afraid to be seen as nerdy or brainy, thus risking losing her new friends, Yuki pretends that she is not smart and intentionally reads aloud badly in English class. Yet, she had been the top student in her grade the year before, a position she recently lost to a new transfer student, Ai, who rarely attends classes. Ai is a prodigy and a highly sensitive child, and on her first day at school, well into the first term, she angers the math teacher, who assumes she is deliberately not paying attention in class. Ai brilliantly solves the difficult math problem the teacher puts to her as a challenge and immediately becomes a legend among the other students, adding to this status by rarely attending classes. When she next appears, she astounds the class with her insight and frank manner.
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Not long after, Yuki cancels a rare outing with her dad to visit a record shop on a Saturday. They both love old LPs and are true record nerds, as was Yuki’s mother. Although Yuki had been looking forward to the outing, the tennis club girls invited her to go shopping for matching hair accessories to wear to the school sports festival, and she feels she can’t miss this chance. However, seeing the three of them lined up in front of a mirror at the shopping mall, yellow ribbons adorning their long ponytails, short-haired Yuki is overcome with a sense of not belonging and not being true to herself, and runs out. The three send messages and apologies via social media. . . .
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Meanwhile, Yuki runs into Makoto, a boy in the student council and a comrade of sorts, and sees a side of him that is very different from his persona at school. He takes her along to a cultural exhibit, and in turn, she takes him to the record shop she planned to visit with her dad that day. Not long after, they run into Ai, who tells them about her past. Ai’s story is what makes Yuki realize that what she has assumed to be peer pressure is nothing more than the expectations she has projected onto others. Yuki realizes she has been living a lie and that she has imposed rules on herself because of assumptions she made about her friends and family. She has robbed others of the possibility of knowing what she is really like, and of the chance to make their own decisions about her and their relationships. Her realization is a brilliant example of Kant’s claim that the rules we give ourselves are the ones that bind us most deeply.
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With her realization, and the gift of critical distance, Yuki can be herself and let others see what she’s really like, and finds that she is accepted after all, just as she is.
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