The next morning, Miu makes breakfast. K ponders the weird love triangle he is in. He feels desire for Sumire, but she cannot reciprocate it. Meanwhile, her own desire for Miu is not reciprocated, though Miu feels close to her. At the same time, K feels desire for his girlfriend, but he cannot feel the same love for her that he has for Sumire.

Miu tells K that she plans to go to the embassy in Athens later that day. She will also call Sumire’s parents. She brings K to the police station to ask for updates, but they receive none. K asks if Sumire possibly fell into a well, but the police assure him that there are no wells on the island. When they ask if she drowned, the police tell them it is unlikely, as there are no strong currents around the island.

Afterward, Miu and K part. Miu charters a boat to Rhodes, and K visits the beach Miu and Sumire visited. When he arrives, he takes in its beauty. He swims nude and dozes on the beach, imagining the desire that must have consumed Sumire while she was here with Miu. When a strange quiet descends on the beach, K becomes unsettled and walks back to the villa. He remembers Miu telling him that Sumire was writing before she disappeared, and he decides he must find what she wrote.

He searches her word processor but finds nothing. With nowhere else to look, K turns his attention toward Sumire’s suitcase. It has a four-digit lock that K opens with his zip code. Inside, he finds a diary and a floppy disk. The diary has little in it, so he puts the disk into the word processor and finds two documents.

The first document begins with a question: “DID YOU EVER SEE ANYONE SHOT BY A GUN WITHOUT BLEEDING?” (131).

Sumire is writing at four o’clock in the morning, wanting to finish her work before Miu wakes and their day begins. She laments her struggles to write, saying that writing is essential to her; before she can think about something, she must write it out first. Even as a child, she needed writing, and she uses it to determine who she is.

She believes that she stopped writing after meeting Miu because she stopped thinking. Her desire for Miu caused her to react rather than act, going along with what life brought her. Now, she struggles to determine what she knows and does not know. She can no longer distinguish what is real and not real. She knows that what she knows and what she does not know occupy the same space in her mind, separated by a wall. She brings that wall down.

Sumire describes dreams as a space in which the mind does not need to make distinctions between the real and unreal. With the wall gone, it is like she lives dreaming. In dreams, the real and unreal do not collide, unlike in reality. This reminds her of the movie The Wild Bunch and how a reporter once asked why there was so much blood in the violent movie. An actor responded, “Did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?” (136). In reality, Sumire believes that people have to accept that which is difficult to understand.

In her writing, Sumire relates a dream she often has. In it, she climbs a spiral staircase to meet her mother, who died when Sumire was young. Sumire knows that her mother means to tell her something important, something essential to Sumire’s survival. It takes a long time to reach the top of the stairs, and when she does, Sumire sees her mother wedged into a hole in the wall. Just as Sumire reaches her, her mother is pulled through the hole and disappears. When Sumire turns back to the stairs, they are gone, replaced by a doorway into nothing but air. Sumire looks out the door and sees planes flying. She then notices that the planes become dragonflies. The sound of their wings grows louder until Sumire cannot handle it. She closes her eyes, covers her ears, and wakes up.

After this dream, Sumire decides she must be honest with Miu about her desire. She wants to make love to Miu and will take the risk to make her desire a reality.

The second document is an account by Sumire of Miu’s traumatic past and the event that turned her hair white and changed her life. While in France, Sumire asks Miu what happened, and the two stay up all night talking. Miu warns Sumire about the story, reminding her that she tries to forget it, but Sumire insists on hearing it.

When Miu was 25, she lived in Paris, studying music. One summer, she traveled to a small town in Switzerland to oversee some business for her father. The town was charming, and Miu decided to stay for the summer, renting a furnished apartment. From her window, she could see the amusement park outside of town, where a Ferris wheel lit up the dark each night.

She often visited the café and became acquainted with an older man named Ferdinando. When she realized that Ferdinando was interested in her, Miu tried to avoid him, though she felt as though he followed her. The unease that Ferdinando incited in Miu was soon replicated across town, as she began to feel an anti-Asian prejudice. The town became less charming, and she felt less comfortable in her apartment. At night, the phone would ring, but no one would be on the other end. Miu was convinced it was Ferdinando.

One night, after dinner at a local restaurant, Miu decided to go to the amusement park. She bought a ticket for the Ferris wheel. The ride attendant warned her that they were closing soon, and she would only have one cycle on the ride. When Miu reached the top, the beauty of the town and its lights was breathtaking. Realizing that her apartment would be in view, Miu took out a pair of binoculars, but just as she located her window, her car descended.

When Miu returned to the ground, she found her car locked and the attendant missing. Hoping that he was in the bathroom, she rode the Ferris wheel back up, but her car stopped just after reaching the top. As she watched the lights around the park go off, Miu realized that she would be trapped until morning. She tried dropping a note out the window, but no one noticed her.

As she waited, Miu used her binoculars to look at her apartment again and was shocked by what she saw. Miu saw herself inside her apartment. She was naked, and Ferdinando was there. Miu watched as they had sex, and she felt a creeping suspicion that they wanted her to see. She didn’t remember anything after this and woke up the next day in a hospital bed, her hair now white. Someone found her on the Ferris wheel with minor injuries, though no one could determine how she received them.

After this experience, Miu felt as though half of her was missing, as though she was on the other side of reality, where the Miu who had sex with Ferdinando was. This version of her took her hair and her desire. After that summer, Miu stopped playing the piano, moved back to Japan, and took over her father’s company.

After hearing this story, Sumire realizes that she loves both the Miu in front of her and the half that Miu lost. Sumire also wonders if she could be split like Miu. She begins to wonder who she really is.