Noge Alley always had a way of slowing time—but tonight, it felt as if it folded time altogether. The lanterns glowed with their usual sunset warmth, casting ripples of amber across the narrow street. Jazz drifted from an upstairs bar, unraveling into the night like a familiar thread. The clink of glasses, the soft sizzling of yakitori, the laughter rising in small bursts—all of it blended into a tapestry so comforting that I almost didn’t notice the shape standing under the swaying lantern ahead.
But something tugged at me. A silhouette. The tilt of a head. A posture I had once known as well as my own reflection.
I blinked. And then the years fell away.
There he was.
Kenji.
He stood outside an izakaya, holding a half-empty highball glass, listening to some story being told inside. He hadn’t seen me yet. His hair was flecked with the gentlest hint of gray, and the lines at the corners of his eyes had deepened, but the way he shifted his weight from one leg to the other was unmistakably the same—the rhythm he had even when we were seventeen, leaning against the fence behind school, pretending we understood the world.
My heart stuttered in my chest. Not painfully—just with the shock of recognition, of finding something you thought you had lost to time. I stepped forward. Tried to inhale. The air tasted of soy sauce, citrus, laughter. My feet carried me before I fully realized it.
“Kenji?” I said.
He turned. For a moment he froze, as though unsure if I were real. Then his eyebrows rose—the same way they did when he solved a puzzle or heard something unbelievable—and he set his drink down without looking.
“…No way,” he breathed. “Is it really—?”
I nodded, unable to stop the smile spreading across my face. We stood there under the lantern’s glow, two people aged by different winters, staring at each other like a pair of lost memories that had finally found their way back home.
He let out a small laugh, disbelieving. “I thought you were still in Kyoto.”
“I thought you were still abroad.”
“Life happened,” he said with a shrug, but there was tenderness behind it. “But I never expected it to happen into you here of all places.”
Noge’s slow night wrapped around us. A couple brushed past, laughing over skewers. The jazz bar above shifted into a softer tune—almost conspiratorial. A cat trotted between us before disappearing under a crate of beer bottles.
Kenji cleared his throat. “Do you… have time? To talk?”
I looked around. The izakaya lights shimmered. The streets were warm with the comfort of strangers. The evening felt like it had opened a door just for us.
“I have all the time you want,” I said.
We slipped into the izakaya, taking two seats squeezed between the counter and the coats of regulars. The owner nodded at Kenji with the vague recognition given to someone who has visited once, maybe twice, never often enough to become a fixture. We ordered beer. The cold glasses clinked.
“What are the odds?” he said.
“Tiny,” I replied. “Which makes this feel like fate.”
We talked. Not about everything—years can’t be reassembled in a single night—but about enough. Family, places we wandered to, mistakes we made, the people we lost along the way. There were silences too, comfortable ones, like the pauses between lantern sways.
When we finally stepped out into the alley again, the night had deepened, the glow richer, the jazz slower.
“Let’s not disappear on each other again,” he said softly.
I nodded. “Let’s not.”
We walked side by side toward the end of the street, our shadows stretching long across the stones. The warmth of Noge followed us—lanterns flickering, doors sliding open and shut, the gentle bustle of a district that had seen countless reunions, countless partings, countless stories woven into its narrow arteries.
But tonight, it had given us this one—unexpected, delicate, stitched together under the glow of a single swaying lantern.