Beneath the Paper Moon

Otsuki Ren made lanterns the way her mother had taught her: with mulberry paper, bamboo ribs, and a patience that bordered on reverence. Each lantern took three days. The paper had to be soaked and dried twice, the bamboo split and shaved until it bent without breaking, the paste mixed from rice flour and rainwater collected during the new moon. Her mother had insisted on the rainwater. Ren had never understood why until the night she held a finished lantern up to the sky and noticed, for the first time, that the moon's light and the lantern's light were the same colour. Not similar. Identical. As though they shared a source.

The village of Tsukimura sat in a valley between two mountains that the locals called the Gateposts, because from certain angles they framed the moon as it rose, making it appear to hang between them like a lantern in a doorway. The village had made lanterns for as long as anyone could remember. The craft was passed from mother to daughter, and no one questioned why, in the same way that no one questioned why the village existed at all — tucked into a valley too narrow for farming, too remote for trade, sustained by a lantern-making tradition that served no obvious economic purpose.

Ren questioned it on the night the moon flickered. She was sitting on the roof of her workshop, as she often did after finishing a lantern, watching the moon clear theeastern Gatepost. The light was steady, as it always was — and then it was not. It guttered, the way a candle gutters in a draft, and for one fraction of a second, the valley went dark. Not the darkness of a clouded sky but a deeper darkness, the darkness of a sky with nothing in it at all. The moment passed. The moon steadied. But Ren had seen it, and she knew, with the certainty of a craftsman who understands the behaviour of light, that what she had just witnessed was not an astronomical event. It was a lantern running out of fuel.