This is Amiko, Do You Copy?

Amiko is a girl who does things her own way, and the people around her rarely know what to make of it. She eats curry rice with her hands at school. She peeks through the sliding doors at her mother's calligraphy class. Her curiosity and high spirits mostly draw confusion rather than welcome.

At home, the ground shifts. Her mother sinks into a depression, and her brother starts spending all his time with a motorcycle gang. Amiko is left more and more on her own, in a world that has no obvious place for her.

This is a novella, short and told close to a neurodivergent child's way of seeing. The tone is tender and quiet, with an off-kilter edge, and the attention stays on small daily moments: school, the family house, the rooms where adults are busy with their own troubles.

It is a slim, gentle read about belonging and being misread, aimed at anyone who likes a narrator who sees the world at a slant. The author also wrote The Woman in the Purple Skirt.