Windy Tales

Nao is one of only two members of the Digital Camera Club. She only takes photos of the sky and clouds. While she's looking through the finder the slowly drifting clouds, she witnesses a cat walking leisurely in the sky. Surprised, she stumbles and falls off from the rooftop, but miraculously escapes death, owing to a sudden gust of wind that saves her life. This accident immediately puts Nao in the center of attention. In order to avoid the fuss, Nao comes up to the rooftop again, and there she meets her classmate Ryoko.

Having discovered Mr. Taiki who saved her life, Nao takes her friends Miki and Jun, and heads out to a small town to visit Mr. Taiki's home. Nao and her friends meet an old man who calls himself "The Town's Greatest Wind Handler".

When the club moderator urges Nao, "Why don't you send in your photos to a contest or something once in a while?" she usually puts off the idea by telling herself that she would if she could come up with a good photo. One day, a job request is made to the digital camera club. It is a request to take photos for a journal of Atsuko running. She's in the track and field club at school, and is considered the favourite in the coming regional track and field meet.

On his way home from school, Jun rescues a flying squirrel fleeing from a flock of crows. Kept as a pet since it was a baby, the flying squirrel can't fly nor can it even find food for itself. Jun feels sorry and decides to keep it, naming it "Donguri" (Acorn).

Mr. Makino is a very popular teacher. He conducts a regular class for the first 30 minutes and then tells "really scary stories" for the last 15 minutes. The dean complains to him, "The other teachers are all doing their 45-minute lessons according to the rules. You should know better. You're an adult." But Mr. Makino has no intention of changing his style. He doesn't like the stuffy atmosphere of the staffroom, so he spends all his spare time in the nurse's office reading books. One day, Nao is resting in the nurse's office sick with the flu, and, through the curtain, hears Mr. Makino talk about his trip to Malaysia.

After attending their cram school, a group of elementary school kids go over a fence into a high-rise construction area to play "kick-the-can". Nao, who happens to be passing by, is shocked to see the kids taking to the air as if there was no gravity. "Are these kids... using the wind?" The next day, she goes back with Ryoko to investigate.

Looking up at the rapidly moving clouds, pushed along by the approaching typhoon, Nao is taking pictures with her digital camera. At the same time, Ryoko comes up to the rooftop. She notices there was no sign of the Windcat, which usually floats in the air. When a school announcement tells the students that it's time to go home, the students stream out of the school but Nao and Ryoko stay behind. They are desperately looking for the cat when Mr. Taiki, who is on night duty, comes around on one of his patrols.

While taking part in the clean up of the digital camera clubroom, Nao, Miki and Jun finds a cardboard box on the top shelf. There is an old album in the box filled only with photos of clouds. Nao grins when Miki says, "Here is your ancestor." But her smile disappears when she opens the next page. It was a photo of a female student holding a baby in one arm and pressing the shutter of a small camera with the other hand. In order to return the album to the owner, the threesome, forgetting that they were cleaning the room, start their search with a list of club members as their only clue and the date "September 9, 1991" marked on the back of the album.

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