Snow City

Her name is Echo Japonica, and she lives in Snow City. But she was not always Echo, and she did not always live in Snow City. Somewhere else, she was someone else, and it was to Snow City that she fled in order to escape a place and a self that had at last become intolerable. For Snow City is a dream—Echo's dream—of a better place, an idealized place, a place of both anonymity and fulfillment. It is, for Echo, a haven of peace, a refuge, a sanctuary. But Snow City remains, nonetheless, a dream, and dreams, being such fragile things, can so easily shade into nightmare...