Shinko Aoki, a spirited nine-year-old with a perpetual cowlick she calls her “mai mai,” roams the rice fields and wooded hills of 1950s Mitajiri, her rural Yamaguchi home. This stubborn tuft of hair mirrors her equally unruly imagination, conjuring vivid scenes from millennium-old tales of Heian-era Princess Nagiko Kiyohara—stories whispered by her grandfather Kotaro during firefly-lit evenings. Her scraped knees and boisterous laughter mark her as the ringleader of the Destiny Squad, a band of village children who dam streams and chase legends through sunlit valleys.

When Tokyo-transplant Kiiko Shimazu arrives, hollow-eyed from her mother’s death, Shinko’s world gains an unexpected counterpoint. The girls’ friendship stitches together opposites: mud-streaked rural freedom and urban grief, Shinko’s cascading historical daydreams and Kiiko’s quiet realism. Together, they map forgotten shrines and spin stories where Nagiko’s loneliness echoes their own—a princess’s ghostly sigh blending with the wind through bamboo groves.

Shinko’s leadership falters only once, when a classmate’s father hangs himself. She navigates the aftermath with uncharacteristic stillness, guiding her friend through midnight fields to face the specter of familial despair. This jarring brush with adulthood lingers, as does her grandfather’s death—a loss that uproots her family to the city, trading fireflies for streetlamps.

Her final rural summer weaves together mischief and melancholy: sneaking stolen liqueur chocolates with Kiiko, sparring with little sister Mitsuko over imagined slights, glimpsing Nagiko’s translucent figure in the twilight. Each moment etches deeper understanding into Shinko’s sunburned skin—that history’s sorrows and a child’s laughter can coexist, and that growing up means learning to carry both.