A Cloud's Diary 
Cho Shinta

○. ○. (Snow) I see a snowman. He looks quite a lot like me, so I went closer. He has a nicely made face. I don't have a face. I am a cloud, after all. This is the beginning of a diary by a cloud with no face. Fluffy, fluffy — that's how I'll go on living!

○. ○. (Overcast) I arrived in cold lands. Chunks of ice are floating in the sea. They are called "drift ice." I wanted to get a good look at them, so I moved closer — and this is what happened. It's cold. The "drift ice" crunches and seems to be laughing at me.

○. ○. (Overcast) Under a dark sky there is a blue lake. There are lots of birds called grebes here. They always hop into the water and before I know it, they surface again. And then they call out "ru, ru, ru". I became a grebe. Look, this too is thanks to them. But I cannot dive underwater. That frustrates me.

○. ○. (Sunny) When spring comes, the snow melts. I am glad that I can float through the sky. I don't even want to think about grebes anymore. We will be friends forever, Kumoko-chan. I think of her. Kumoko-chan was that creature — a cloud dinosaur. Her name was Ryoko-chan. I hope she is alright... But Kumoko-chan is gone.

○. ○. (Sunny) I am on a ship. It looks like it is sailing very far away. I decided to disappear and hitch a ride on it. But my ears tell me: "Stop, stop." I hear "dónde, dónde" and someone says: "That is something the passengers don't like." "Passengers? And who are they?" I ask. "People," comes the answer. Can it really be that there are people who are bothered even by clouds?

○. ○. (Overcast) Today I tried resting on the peak of a snowy mountain. From a distance it apparently looked like a real mountain, and people were quite stirred up about it. That was fun. But I couldn't hold it — I sneezed and the mountain slid away.

○. ○. (Snow) Today it is snowing. I would love to see the happy faces of everyone going to school, but the snow must fall. Quietly, quietly it snows. I hope nobody loses their mittens... and I hope nobody catches a cold. Quietly... quietly... quietly...

-

Coming, Coming 
text by Uchida Rintaro 
illustrations by Cho Shinta

In the vast mountain landscape of Yamato there were forests aplenty. But how many is plenty? There were so many bears — two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred — and as for mice, there were too many to count.

The snow fell for fifty days, and at last it stopped. But… the mountains and the forests — everything looked like this.

When such a winter came, all the animals of the forest curled up in their dens. But the snow piled up and piled up, nothing but snow — there was nowhere left to hide. The wolf finally couldn't bear it any longer and began to complain: "It simply cannot be that the cold should come in the shape of a snowflake!" And just at that moment…

Thud! The forest suddenly flew up out of the ground and floated in the air. And then…

The surprised animals asked what was happening. Things buried in the snow rose up and turned into a forest.

WHOOOOA!

The forest was shaking so much from the cold — it asked the mountains of Yamato to turn the skipping rope, and thud — thud — it jumped and jumped.