A novel modeled on writer Fumiko Hayashi, depicting wartime service in the southern front, literary creation, and a hidden love. Crossing history and fiction, it follows the desire and loneliness of a woman writer trapped by war.

In the wartime south, a writer’s words and love take on a heat from which there is no escape.

A love story centered on Yoshiko and Shuya, where the wish to believe, dependence, guilt, and flight become entangled. Choices that seem to lead toward happiness push the two toward a place from which they cannot return.

When belief and escape overlap, love sinks into the bottom of rain.

A love story in which a woman’s consultation with her professor about trouble with her lover begins to loosen the seams of seemingly happy lives around her, asking what people hide and perform for love.

Beneath ordinary happiness, an illicit love quietly changes shape.