Gives us a few pieces of the puzzle. Aya was last seen the day of the Tanabata Festival, but Aya remembers it being the day before the festival when she ends up in the future. Erika supposedly had a conversation of some kind with Aya on the day of the Tanabata Festival, and may be the last person who saw her before she disappeared. But, Erika is also curious about what Aya did after leaving said conversation, so it's unlikely (but NOT disproven) Erika was directly involved.
Good catch. Given the Tanabata theme, it could be a wish Erika wrote and hung up on the bamboo. She must have been tormented with guilt ever since, in that case.
This reappeared Aya seems to be fully functional and capable of independent feeling and thinking, and also corporeal enough for a check up at hospital, so I think we can rule out the "ghost" and "Koto's and Erika's projection" theories.
Of all the theories posted so far, this is the one I like the best. Erika literally murdering Aya, as a previous poster suggested, seems just a bit too dark/edgy for this sort of manga, but Erika making a Tanabata wish for Aya to "go away" or similar seems like a much more plausible thing for a heartbroken and jealous 14-year-old to do. Another piece of supporting evidence is that Erika believed Aya was alive this whole time, even though the normal assumption after a young girl has been missing for years would be that she's dead. It would also help explain her somewhat contradictory actions in this chapter: she goes out of her way to help out Aya and observes how, with the benefit of hindsight, Aya wasn't really an untouchable existence like she seemed at the time but a fragile teenager just like her; at the same time, however, she continues to display some jealousy and resentment, unnecessarily bringing up Aya's dead grandfather and lying that she doesn't know how Koto feels about Aya.
(And yeah, I highly doubt Aya is a ghost or projection: we see her taking a shower, changing clothes, etc. Maybe there'll be some huge twist but right now all signs point to time travel.)
Now, moving on from Erika speculations, I'll say that the thing I liked the most about this chapter is how seriously it's treating its ridiculous premise. It's so common for manga to just play stuff like this for comedy, but I really appreciated how unflinchingly it depicted what the real results would be of someone being flung forward in time seven years. Aya has been forcibly removed from everything she once knew; her friends have grown up, her home's no longer there, and her grandfather died without her even being there. It's an incredible trauma that she can't even really grieve because she wasn't around for it all to happen to her. Erika asks why Aya thought now was the right time to say she was dating Koto, but I think it was because Aya is desperately trying to retain whatever scraps she can of the world she used to exist in. While she continues to be a mysterious character in many ways, all this does a great job of making her compelling to me. In that sense, the biggest weakness of the manga so far is Koto, who is far less interesting than both Aya and Erika, but hopefully the next chapter will give her more of a spotlight so we can have a better sense of what Adult Koto is like.
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