One year has passed since the novel's publication, and the narrator wishes that he could stay in Fukuoka with his aunt or stay with his father, who lives in Hokkaido, a small town in northern Japan. He hopes that things will work out between him and his mother, who has not lived together for eight years. The narrator tells us that he has been trying to find out what the smell of her bed-head is, and that the girls at her school are jealous that she is using the same kind of stinky laundry soap that she uses for her bed. He says that at his old school, the girls made him an outcast because of a boy who was popular with the other girls, and he says that by the time the day was over, everyone had passed around a note saying that the boy had been taken from everyone else.