"You need something to do with your hands," he had said, with the blunt practicality that was Takumi's version of care. "Something that isn't wandering around train stations looking at puddles."
Hiroto had not argued. He was seventeen, nearly broke, and had recently spent an entire Sunday afternoon re-reading the same passage in a folklore book forty minutes from home. Takumi was probably right.
The restaurant was called Amaoto — Rain Sound — a small family-run place two streets from Yukihara Station, the kind that had been there long enough that the menu was handwritten and the tables had small dents worn into them from years of elbows. It served teishoku sets at lunch and small izakaya plates in the evening. The owner, a quiet man in his sixties named Ogawa-san, had asked Hiroto three questions during the interview: could he carry things without dropping them, was he reliable, and did he have any objection to washing dishes. Hiroto had answered yes, he hoped so, and no. He was hired on the spot for the Monday-Wednesday-Friday evening shift.
He showed up on Monday not knowing what to expect and stood at the back entrance in his plain white shirt feeling profoundly uncertain about all of it.
Then the back door opened from the inside, and someone handed him an apron.
"You're the new one," she said. Not a question. She said it the way someone states a fact they've already filed away — efficient, matter-of-fact, with a brief upward glance that took him in and moved on. "I'm Yuki. I'll show you the floor."