Kazu lifted the silver kettle up a little higher and uttered the words, “Drink the coffee before it goes cold,” and then slowly began lowering the spout toward the cup. She moved with an impenetrable beauty, as if she was performing a solemn ritual.

When the spout was just a few centimeters from the cup, a threadlike column of black coffee appeared. It was soundless, and it didn’t appear to be moving; only the surface of the liquid in the cup rose. The coffee that filled the vessel resembled a pitch-black shadow.

Transfixed by this beautiful sequence of movements, Gohtaro saw a plume of steam rise from the cup.

As he watched the steam, a strange sensation, much like dizziness, enveloped him, and everything surrounding the table began to ripple and shimmer.

Worried that another wave of sleepiness was coming on, he tried to rub his eyes.

“Argh,” he exclaimed unintentionally.

His hands, his body, were becoming one with the steam from the coffee. It had not been his surroundings that were rippling and shimmering; it had been him. Suddenly, his surroundings began to move so that everything above him was falling past him with amazing speed.

Experiencing all this, he screamed out, “Stop, stop!”

He was no good with scary rides—the mere sight of them was enough to make him swoon—but unfortunately for him, his surroundings seemed to be going past him faster and faster, as time wound back twenty-two years.

He felt increasingly giddy. When he realized that he was now returning to the past, his consciousness gradually receded.

After Shuichi and his wife died, Gohtaro ran the restaurant alone while bringing up Haruka. Even while Shuichi was still alive, multitalented and diligent Gohtaro had worked out how to manage the restaurant single-handedly, from the cooking to the accounting.

But Gohtaro, a bachelor, found that raising a small child was unimaginably difficult. Haruka had just turned one—which meant she was now taking her first tentative steps—and someone needed to be watching her all the time. She would also often cry at night, which deprived him of sleep. When she entered nursery school, he thought that life would become easier, but she became anxious around strangers and hated going. Every day she would burst into tears when it was time to leave.

When she was in elementary school, she would often announce she was going to help in the restaurant but only ended up being a nuisance. It was difficult to know by the words she used exactly what she meant, and if he didn’t always listen to what she had to say she would sulk. If she got a fever, he had to take her to the doctor. And of course, children have a social calendar too, including birthdays, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and so on. On holiday, it bothered him when she asked to be taken to a funfair, or say she wanted this and that.