Her body assumes a seemingly infinite variety of forms, each of a different utility. Photograph by Pari Dukovic for The New Yorker

The mother and father of Ashima Shiraishi, a fourteen-year-old New Yorker who has been called the most talented rock climber in the world, met in fashion school, in Tokyo, in the early seventies. Hisatoshi Shiraishi, the father, was from the southern island of Shikoku, and Tsuya Otake, the mother, was from Fukushima, where her family had a garment factory. After graduating, they travelled together to Europe and, captivated by the punk scene in London, settled there for a while. Upon their return to Japan, Hisatoshi, who went by the nickname Poppo, took up the study of Butoh, an avant-garde dance form. After a couple of years, Tsuya flew to New York on a tourist visa and sent word that the city was more exciting than Tokyo or London. Poppo followed. This was 1978. Tsuya was right—New York was very exciting.

After a week, Poppo found a stage: the fountain in Washington Square Park. Most days, he danced there in the shallow pool. When winter came, he began performing both inside and outside night clubs downtown: the Mudd Club, Pyramid, Danceteria. By the mid-eighties, he was a minor celebrity in the East Village arts scene, known for his intense brand of street theatre. Naked save for a loincloth, and spray-painted gold from head to toe, he danced sometimes with a burning dummy, amid fires he’d set on the sidewalk, or he surfed atop passing taxis, or he stood still for twenty minutes, barefoot, on a block of ice. He founded a troupe, called Poppo and the Go-Go Boys, which had as many as twenty dancers, most of them women, and they performed at downtown theatres—La MaMa, the Kitchen, the Joyce—and toured overseas. Videos of a few of these performances have survived into the YouTube age. In them, Poppo is limber and lean—a ghoul in gold or white paint. The Times described his movements onstage as those of “a powerful, slightly wry priest.” Spin noted his ability to discern gods in the neighborhood trash and pronounced him “strong on punk ethics.” Meanwhile, Tsuya, who was working as a saleswoman at a Japanese clothing store in the East Village, paid the rent.

Eventually, Poppo and Tsuya got married. Tsuya had a green card. For more than ten years, they tried to have a child, availing themselves of every method they could afford. When Tsuya turned fifty, they were ready to give up, but their doctor urged them to try once more. “It was our last chance,” Tsuya said. In June, 2001, a daughter was born: Ashima. “She was a miracle baby,” Tsuya said.

Tsuya recalls that even in the hospital nursery Ashima ceaselessly moved her hands, arms, and legs: “All the time, not stop. I couldn’t believe it. I think she has monkey DNA.” Tsuya has a sardonic sense of humor, and a husky laugh. She and Poppo both struggle with English, despite having lived in New York City for nearly forty years.

Their aspirations for Ashima were lofty and vague. “When Ashima was born, I have an idea for her,” Tsuya said. “She grow up, create things, and make people happy. It came true. Now kids want to be like Ashima.”

Climbing was not originally a part of the plan. They hardly knew that it existed. The real miracle may be that a little girl from the unmountainous island of Manhattan, born to insular, artistic immigrants who had never tied a figure-eight knot, became, by the age of fourteen, possibly the best female rock climber ever—a Gretzky of the granite. Ungrudgingly admired by seasoned dirtbags and muscular young rock rats, she is, even though still young, perhaps the first female climber whose accomplishments may transcend gender, and the first rock climber who could become a household name. There have been articles and photo spreads in newspapers and sports magazines, films and countless YouTube clips, an appearance on Time’s list of America’s most influential teen-agers, and, of course, a TED talk. (She’s no Tony Robbins, but she held her own.) Amid all this, she still lives with her parents in a rent-controlled loft on West Twenty-sixth Street and trains five days a week, under the eye of her father, who, many years ago, gave up Butoh to coach and guide her.

Every ascent combines, to varying degrees, elements of technical skill, physical strength, imagination, concentration, and tolerance for risk. Climbers are stronger in some elements than in others and so favor certain disciplines. The various approaches depend in large part on the extent and the manner of “protection”—the cams, nuts, bolts, and pitons that support the rope, and the climber attached to it. Sport climbing takes place on routes, either in gyms or outdoors, that have fixed protection; you hook your rope into existing bolts. “Trad” (traditional) involves climbing outdoors and putting in your own protection as you go. Free soloing is climbing without protection. You fall, you die.

Bouldering consists of short routes, or “problems,” of no higher than twenty feet or so, on freestanding boulders and accessible overhangs or in climbing gyms. Boulderers eschew protection—you fall, you ache. Bouldering, the Patagonia founder and rock-climbing pioneer Yvon Chouinard once said, is “instant suffering.”

Bouldering was for years just a way to goof off or train between big ascents. Starting in the fifties, John Gill, a mathematician and gymnast from Georgia, made bouldering a discipline unto itself. There was little glory to be found in standing atop a twenty-foot rock, so it was all about how you got there: means over end. This is where the idea arose of boulders as problems. Gill advocated style, power, and grace, and considered bouldering to be a variation on gymnastics, as well as a form both of personal expression and of moving meditation. He was the first to use gymnastics chalk (now commonplace) to keep the hands dry.

Ashima excels at sport climbing and bouldering. She is a gym-era child who nevertheless climbs outside whenever she can. That’s where you make a name for yourself. Still, she claims to have no interest in the big walls of Yosemite, to say nothing of serious mountaineering. “I’m not really into Alpine,” she told me. “I don’t like the cold. I don’t like ice or snow.” She prefers the pocked syenite humps of the Hueco Tanks, near El Paso—a bouldering Mecca. (She spent the Thanksgiving weekend there, with her father and some older climbing friends.) For her, a climb is a puzzle, not an expedition.