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[Purple Library Guy]

I don't have a clue.
At first, I half thought the whole weirdness of the town might actually have been created by her in the first place by some great but unconscious power in her. Like, maybe Kou-chan was dead, or maybe the whole town had been destroyed, and her psyche had warped reality, re-creating the town as it was when Kou-chan was alive so that she'd be able to see him again, and it was repeating that last day before Kou-chan died forever to stop him from dying again.

But now there's these other people with symbols on their hands and power and their own agendas, so it seems like that must be wrong. So I got nothing . . . it's just too weird and there don't seem to be any real clues.

What compounds it is not only do we not know anything about what might be behind the town's weirdness or why or who, we know even less about the outside world than we do about the town. I get the vague impression that there was something really abnormal about her life, and that she wasn't happy. And the young boy seems to think Tokyo exists. Beyond that it's a blank. We don't know why she left the town. We don't know anything about how she lives, although it seems she does normally go to school and take the train to get there. We don't know if she has parents or relatives or, really, any human contact ever aside from Kou-chan. She seems to have trouble grappling with the concept of what's a friend; seems like maybe she's never had one before. In some ways she seems something akin to borderline autistic.

We also know hardly anything about Kou-chan. I'm wondering if Kou-chan might even be a ghost or something, on the slender reed that about the only thing we know for sure is, his hands are cold. I'm imagining misunderstood Tabi hanging out in the cemetery as a young girl, unlike everyone else being able to see Kou-chan and probably never even realizing there was anything odd about him . . .

One thing I'll say about this manga, it gets the imagination going.