Abacus Longing, the First Chapter~ Episode 158

A novel not easy to read quickly as it slips between three stories. The three stories are:

Teenage computer programmer who believes she’s being stalked,

High school math genius and her manga artist friend,

An alien who is her own reincarnated changeling self who crash lands on Earth.

Nothing is at it seems. Or it is really easy to read because it isn’t difficult at all. Abacus Longing, the novel I wrote while writing the previous two novels The Nuns of Nañao and The Tokyo Tunnel Girl.

Actually, all three novels are not exactly linear. The Tokyo Tunnel Girl skips between two stories, at least: the woman in the tunnel, the man trying to find her, and the conspiracy cover up story. Okay, three stories.

The Nuns of Nañao jumps between time (three pasts and one now), places (Stalingrad, Mongolia, Brooklyn, Yokohama, and the tunnels of Tokyo), and people (the now-Russian, the then-Russian, Death as a sunbather in New Jersey). 

However, Abacus Longing careens between stories like an out-of-control UFO crash landing South of Seattle while a book about birds reveals intimate secrets about the reader to the reader as a manga-artist scribbles a story about a UFO!

This episode is the first chapter of Abacus Longing and a very short chapter it is, too, wherein we meet our first protagonist, the teenage computer genius

For more on this book, check out Episode 154, below.