“Yes,” Yukio answered. He downed his glass of water and took a deep breath.

“Let’s begin now, please,” he added softly.

Kazu nodded and slowly lifted the silver kettle in her right hand.

“Pass on my regards to Kinuyo sensei,” she said, and added...

“Remember, before the coffee gets cold...”

Moving as if in slow motion, Kazu began pouring the coffee into the cup. While still maintaining a casual demeanor, her movements were beautiful, flowing seamlessly like those of a ballerina. The entire café around them seemed pregnant with tension, as if a solemn ceremony was underway.

A very thin column of coffee poured from the silver kettle’s spout, resembling a narrow black line. There was no gurgling sound of coffee pouring as one might hear from the wide rim of a carafe. Instead, the coffee flowed silently into the brilliant white cup. As Yukio stared at the striking contrast of black coffee and white cup, a single plume of steam began to rise. Just at that moment, his surroundings began to shimmer and ripple.

In a panic, he tried to rub both his eyes but found he was unable to. As he lifted his hands to his face, they still felt like hands, but they were now vapor. It wasn’t just his hands, it was his body, his legs—all of him.

What’s going on?

At first, he was shocked by the unexpected events, but after considering what would follow, nothing seemed to matter any more. He slowly closed his eyes as his surroundings gradually began falling past him.

Yukio remembered Kinuyo.

As a child, he had as many as three brushes with death.

On each of these occasions Kinuyo was by his side.

The first time was when he was two. A bout of pneumonia had given him a fever of nearly forty degrees and a persistent cough. Nowadays, pneumonia is no longer difficult to recover from. Thanks to medical advances, there are now effective antibiotics that will knock it on the head. Today, it is common medical knowledge that the main causes of pneumonia for young children are bacteria, viruses, and mycoplasma, and there are clear methods of treatment for each.

Back then, however, it was not uncommon for a doctor to simply say, “There is nothing else I can do. Now it’s up to your son.” In Yukio’s case, they didn’t know that his pneumonia was bacterial, and when his high fever and severe coughing continued, the doctor said, “Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.”

The second time he almost drowned. He had been playing at the river’s edge when he was seven. Miraculously, on that occasion, he was revived after both his breathing and heart had stopped. The person who found him had fortuitously worked for the local fire and ambulance station and had the ability to administer life-saving CPR immediately. Kinuyo had been at the river with him, but it all happened in a second when she had taken her eyes off him.