Keiko Furukura, a thirty-six-year-old who has worked happily in the same Tokyo convenience store for eighteen years, quits under pressure from family and friends and from the lazy, bitter Shiraha, who moves in with her.

Mikage Sakurai, who lost her grandmother and found comfort with Yuichi Tanabe and his transgender mother Eriko, supports Yuichi after Eriko is murdered.

Shuya Nanahara and Noriko Nakagawa survive the government’s “Program,” in which a class of forty-two students must kill each other on an island until one remains, thanks to the transfer student Shogo Kawada.

Middle-school teacher Yuko Moriguchi, whose four-year-old daughter was killed by two of her students, takes revenge after quitting.

William Mandella, a soldier who fought for more than a thousand years of Earth time thanks to relativistic travel, learns that the war with the alien Taurans started by mistake and has ended.

Edward and Florence, newlyweds in 1962, separate after a disastrous wedding night in a Dorset hotel.

Agnes Bain, Shuggie’s mother, dies from her alcoholism after years of struggle in 1980s Glasgow.

After a night of magical confusion in the woods, Oberon has Puck undo the love spells, so the four young lovers end up happily paired: Lysander with Hermia and Demetrius with Helena.

Paul Proteus, a top engineer who joins the Ghost Shirt Society’s revolt against a world run by machines, watches the rebellion succeed briefly in destroying factories in Ilium, New York.

Faina, the mysterious girl who appeared in the Alaskan wilderness after Jack and Mabel built a snow child, grows up, marries their neighbour’s son Garrett and has a baby.