A vending machine hums under a streetlamp, spilling cold light across the pavement. Ko Yamori walks past it without a glance. Fourteen years old, already dead tired of the sun, he has decided that school is a script someone else wrote and the only honest hours are the ones between midnight and dawn. So he wanders. Alone, aimless, spinning a mental list of reasons why love is a concept other people seem to understand and he absolutely does not. That's when Nazuna Nanakusa drops out of the sky — not literally, but the effect is the same — all teeth and easy laughter and a theory that insomnia is just the soul refusing to rest until it's satisfied .

She invites him to her place. A futon. A bitten neck. And the sudden, electric truth that vampires are real, except the transformation isn't a curse or a contagion — it's a love test. You have to fall for the vampire who bites you, or you just wake up woozy with a weird new friend . Ko doesn't panic. Ko does math. A dead-end human life traded for an immortal night one, with Nazuna's fangs as the price of admission? He sets a goal so absurd it almost circles back to romantic: fall in love with her on purpose. But the night has other ideas. An old classmate named Akira circles back into his orbit, and with her comes the daylight he tried to leave behind . The question curdling at 3 a.m. is whether you can consciously choose to fall in love — or whether the night just makes you think you can.

Also known as: Yofukashi no Uta, よふかしのうた, Song of the Night Walkers.