The narrator returns to his childhood home in a small town in northeastern Japan, where he lives with his mother. He has just returned from a trip to a neighboring town, where his mother is the owner of a small shop selling "handmade goods" . The narrator asks his mother if she will give him an advance on his education, and she says that she will. He wonders if he will be able to pass the entrance exams to a public high school in the near future, and he wonders if they will be taking the same entrance exam in the spring. He asks if they know each other from school, and the narrator says that they do, and that they are like childhood friends. He says that he has been waiting for the day when he will get his permit to go to college, and wonders if it will be the day he will meet the artist who makes the box he has seen in the shop window. The artist, he says, is a "kind and elegant woman," and she has told him that it will take a while for her to find out the truth about the box.