WHEN ASHIMA WAS 2, Poppo starting taking her to New York City's Central Park every day, acting on his belief in the importance of nature, trailing his toddling daughter as she explored. When Ashima was 6, she discovered Rat Rock, a huge round boulder not far from the Central Park Zoo. She slid down a smooth crease in the top. Then she noticed people climbing up a steep section of it and decided to try that too. Within three months, she was climbing v9 -- serious prodigy territory.

Poppo started training Ashima in the butoh ways, teaching her Zen basics like "one second, one second, just breathe" and to focus on what he called her "small universe," otherwise known as your core. By age 8, Ashima could flag-pole, or hold her body perpendicular to a rock wall. (Please pause here to consider how insane this is.) The media ate her up. In 2009, New York Magazine ran a profile. In 2012, the New York Times sports section followed. Copies of those stories still hang in her house.

Most of the time, such outsized parental effort ends in heartache, obscurity or worse. But on occasion it does create a superstar, and in that high-risk, high-reward tradition, Poppo stepped up his game. At a climbing competition when Ashima was 8, he decided climbing wasn't just a sport for his daughter; it was her fate, her life, just as butoh had been his. "Other kids ... playing park and rock climbing, same kind of face," Poppo says. "But Ashima's face is different. Face is very honest, quiet, strong."

Climbing truly is mystical to watch. You observe an elite runner and you probably think, "OK, I could never run that fast in a million years, but I do understand what that person is doing." Climbing? The closer you look, the more incomprehensible it becomes. Even if you get a climber to break down and explain the specific moves -- "first you grab that crimper with your right and then you smear" -- and you get that climber to translate what he just said into standard English -- "hold on to that tiny edge with your right hand and use friction from your feet to push up" -- once you touch the wall to try to understand what this means in physical space, the possibility of doing what that climber just described disappears.

Poppo conceded that, to be the best in the world, his daughter would need a bit of technical help in addition to his metaphysical coaching. And so the Shiraishis began riding the train from Manhattan to New Rochelle for Ashima to train with Obe Carrion, who'd been one of the best climbers in the world in the late 1990s. When Ashima first appeared at Carrion's gym, he said, "She didn't yet have her own style. She just liked really small holds because she had small hands. She liked to move statically. Everything was slow and static." So Carrion set out to get Ashima "off her feet" -- to teach her to dyno, to fly.

The first principle of teaching a little girl to fly is: "Momentum equals strength. Speed equals strength." Ashima's performance rocketed. At age 8, she climbed a v10; at age 9, a v11/12; at age 10, a v13. Fewer than 10 women in the world have ever climbed a v13.

"ASHIMA'S BED IS the most comfortable. The food at Ashima's house is the best. Ashima is good at everything."

This is the opinion of Ashima's friends at the Rudolf Steiner School, which I attended one day in the spring. Because it's a Waldorf school, the students learn to knit socks and make dolls of themselves; they rise and say "Good morning, Mrs. Hester!" when a teacher walks in the room.

Ashima's friends, many of whom she's known since kindergarten, have seen her climb exactly once, at her birthday party in fifth grade. They adore her and remain somewhat fuzzy on how truly exceptional she is. The main excitement at school around Ashima's climbing is that actor and teen heartthrob Ansel Elgort works out at her gym sometimes.

Ashima chooses not to bring her "honest, quiet, strong face" to PE. After lunch, the eighth grade files onto a yellow school bus at 79th and Madison to ride up to the 92nd Street Y to play volleyball. In the gym, she doesn't even look like the best athlete on the court. "Nice try, Ashima," one of her teachers says after she misses a bump and shrugs. The only sign of her alternate reality is that she reflexively shakes out her hands.

She's so light and strong and she has such strong fingers. It's crazy, she can heel-hook anything. The tension she creates in her body is nuts. - pro climber Alex Honnold

Home is another planet entirely. The door to the Shiraishis' Chelsea loft opens into what appears to be a playroom for a toddler: mini-trampoline, trapeze, beach balls, cubbies, kid paintings, tiny desk, doll's bed -- all surrounded by a 2-foot-high wooden fence. When she lets me in, I ask Ashima, who is an only child, if she has a young niece or nephew or cousin who comes over to play. She says, pleasant and flat as always, "No, those are mine."

On the other side of the apartment, behind a scrim, is a small kitchen where Tsuya makes rice balls, a bathroom that's painted red, two bedrooms, a kitchen table cluttered with papers, and a sewing machine. There's also a long wooden dowel on which, next to the family's coats, hang about 50 pairs of climbing capris, each in a different fabric, each Ashima's size. The pants are made by Tsuya. As I thumb through them, she bows. Then she pulls open a drawer beneath the dowel, revealing several dozen more pairs.

For years, Ashima has floated among the tectonic plates of her worlds -- school, home and climbing -- young enough to skip over the faults, maybe even pretend they're not there. Because Poppo decided that climbing was not just a hobby for Ashima but her life, starting when she was 8 he made her climb whether or not she wanted to. Her climbing, in turn, transcended to a level far beyond that of anyone else her age. The only other girl in her vicinity was Brooke Raboutou. Brooke's parents, both retired professional climbers, bolted climbing holds all over their house. Her mom, Robyn Erbesfield-Raboutou, turned herself into a youth climbing coach -- and she remains one of the best in the world. But while Brooke's parents fit snugly into the climbing community, Poppo stayed aloof and obtuse.

Tension between Poppo and Carrion began erupting at competitions, especially when Carrion, who remains devoted to Ashima, started coaching her not just in physical technique but in how to keep her head in the right place. "Obe says, 'Big breathe. I can do, I can do, I can do,'" Poppo tells me, glasses dangling on a gold chain around his neck, shaking his head, slightly dismayed. "That kind of thing is not enough." In 2012, Carrion moved to Colorado and stopped coaching Ashima.

The inevitable drama between Ashima and Poppo started playing out in the spring. Climbing gyms are great for competitions, but climbing stars are made on real rocks, outside. So for the past five years, during Ashima's breaks from school, Poppo and Ashima have taken climbing trips. In March, the two traveled to Catalunya, Spain, where they met with Chris Sharma, 34, who for many years was the best climber in the world and is now maybe third, behind Adam Ondra, a geeky 22-year-old Czech, and Alex Megos, a marginally less geeky 22-year-old German.

Sharma is the most mediagenic personality climbing has ever had: He's Fabio-handsome, deeply tanned and prone to shirtlessness, with long, flowing hair. Sharma encouraged Ashima to work on a route in Santa Linya called Open Your Mind Direct, which is graded 5.15a/9a+ -- an almost mystical level of difficulty, perhaps equivalent to running a 4:00 mile -- harder than any route a woman had climbed before. The first day Ashima fell off the start of the route and hurt her wrist. The next three days she spent suffering: trying and falling, trying and falling, her life on the ground becoming cruelly synecdochic. Sharma, one of the few men in the world who'd done the route, shouted technical advice; Poppo countered, sternly, in Japanese, that what Ashima really needed to do was maintain "a deep, quiet and strong mind and soul."

The relief on her face when she completed the climb -- it's too much relief for a 13-year-old girl. "That was so, like, surreal," she said to Sharma, shaking out her head moments after reaching the ground. The two high-fived; Ashima laughed and said, "Ow." On the video -- a crew, naturally, is on hand to film the historic feat because climbing, like the rest of the adventure sports world, adheres strictly to the philosophy that if you don't capture something on film, it didn't happen -- you can hear Sharma prodding: "Give your dad a hug."

For the next 24 hours, Ashima fielded a zillion phone calls -- The Guardian, Smithsonian, Outside, The Huffington Post, dozens of foreign papers. BuzzFeed interviewed Ashima over Snapchat. She lined up a segment with ABC World News Tonight. Was this Ashima's moment? As Poppo noted, "No other climber, this kind of attention. Chris Sharma been here? No."

Then Ashima flew back to New York and resumed eighth grade.