Chapter One

Realer Than You

Everything you think you know about the world isn't true. Nothing is real, it's all made up. We live in a world of illusion. I'm telling you this up front because I don't want you thinking this story is going to have a happy ending. It won't make any sense out of sadness. It won't redeem humanity in even a small sort of way.

My name is Elijah Fulton, and unlike so many things, this actually happened. It happened in Japan at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when I was sixteen and my parents forced me to leave America. It happened in Ami, a suburb an hour away from Tokyo, on a trail in a bamboo forest.

I was running that day, as usual, because running and biking were the only ways I could get anywhere. You had to be eighteen to drive in Japan, so all of a sudden I was a kid again. Without a car, I was stuck in our tiny house with my thirteen-year-old sister and my mom as they learned how to cook Japanese food with Mrs. Fujita, the wife of my dad's boss. Mrs. Fujita was always calling from the kitchen for me to come taste whatever weird thing they were making in there, like, "Come taste this delicious eel, Elijah!" and I wasn't having any of that. So I ran to get away from everything. From my parents and their friends, from my little sister. From Ami. If I could have, I would have run away from Japan altogether.

When I first started running, I didn't know where the roads led to or even in which direction they traveled, so to be safe I'd circle the apartment complex next to our house, and every day I'd run a little further. By the end of my first week I made it to the end of our road, and a few days after that I crossed over