“Certainly,” replied Kazu, averting her eyes politely, and she disappeared into the kitchen.

The man gave a deep sigh and looked around the sepia-colored café. He noticed the dim lamps, the ceiling fan gently rotating, the large clocks on the wall showing seemingly random times, and the woman in the white dress reading a novel in the corner.

Kazu returned.

“Um, is it true that she is a ghost?” the man inquired abruptly.

“Yes.”

The man had asked a very strange question. But Kazu had answered it matter-of-factly. Many customers came to the café out of sheer curiosity after hearing its legend. Kazu had grown so used to such conversations that now they were like small talk for her.

“I see...” replied the man, sounding uninterested.

Kazu started to prepare the coffee in front of him. Ordinarily, she used the siphon. The special feature about coffee brewed by siphon is that boiling hot water in the bottom flask noisily bubbles and rises to the funnel, where it becomes coffee. Then the liquid drops back down into the top flask. Kazu enjoyed watching the siphon brewing in action.

However, for some reason, today she didn’t choose to use the siphon but instead brought the drip-coffee equipment from the kitchen. She brought the mill out with her as well, obviously planning to grind the beans at the counter.

The brewing method of using the dripper was the café owner Nagare’s speciality. The filter is set in the dripper and hot water is gently poured over the grounds to extract the coffee bit by bit. Kazu normally thought the dripper was too much trouble.

She silently proceeded to grind the beans. There was no conversation. Revealing himself to be far from outgoing, the man just scratched his head, seemingly unable to strike up any kind of exchange. Soon, the aroma of coffee began to fill the air.

“Sorry for the wait.”

Kazu placed the lightly steaming coffee in front of the man.

He remained still, just staring at the cup in silence. Kazu began cleaning the apparatus in front of her deftly.

The only sound in the room was the woman in the dress turning the pages of her novel. After a while, the man reached his hand out for the cup. If he had been a coffee-loving customer, at that point he would have inhaled the aroma deeply, but without altering his dull expression, he sipped the coffee with a clumsy slurp. But then...

“This coffee,” he moaned quietly. Its sourness seemed to have surprised him. His expression transformed as furrowed lines formed in the center of his forehead.

The coffee was a variety called mocha, which has a unique blend of pleasant aroma and acid-sour taste. Nagare was obsessed with this taste, and the café only served varieties of mocha. However, for people who normally don’t drink coffee, like this man, the strong distinctive flavor of coffee brewed from only mocha or Kilimanjaro beans is often bewildering.