Ame no Yo ni

After being let go from his job and struggling with burnout, a middle-aged man was approached in the rain by a woman calling out from a girls' bar. Ordinarily, he would have walked right past her, but that day he was feeling desperate enough to stop—and to his surprise, he found himself able to hold an easy, natural conversation with her, despite his usual self-consciousness around women. About a month after he started visiting the girls' bar regularly, he stepped into his go-to standing bar and found the woman there, covered in mud.