The chapter opens with a carefully imagined Japanese wooden house by the sea, its sliding paper doors and tatami floors full of small, living details. Outside, a man and woman work in an August vegetable patch under heavy heat, the island sounds thick with insects and frogs as pumpkins swell and seasons begin to turn.

Time accelerates through years as the man ages faster than his wife, growing dry and frail and shocked by how the body fails. Another half-year passes and the man dies, leaving the woman to live alone in the worn house as the decades move on and damp, mildew, and encroaching ocean mark the slow changes around her.

In a warm late autumn, the woman—still thinking of herself as tough and no-nonsense—lies on the house step in an unusual gesture of surrender as her health fails. She listens to a lone, out-of-season cicada and thinks about the moving point of light in the sky where her daughter is stationed, hoping to hold on for a month until her daughter returns, but realizing death will not wait.

Days pass; the woman’s body is removed and the house is left deserted. From the station, Asia slides away beneath the orbit—Shikoku and Kyushu disappearing into ocean—linking the daughter’s distant viewpoint to the abandoned shoreline where the pumpkins soften and the sea edges closer.

Over the empty Pacific, the strengthening typhoon organizes into a spiraling mass, darker and denser than expected and likely at least Category Four. Told to take as many photographs as possible, the crew presses long lenses to the glass, documents the storm’s anticlockwise ordering, and sends images and coordinates to Earth, feeling like “fortune tellers” who can foresee what is coming but cannot stop it before the orbit carries them into darkness.