Dana Stevens and James Smith are a couple and have been great friends since childhood. They have been in Kyoto city, Japan, for a week, they got graduate school scholarships in Kyoto University. James will be studying computer animation for videogames and Dana will specialize in nature photography.
Running fast through the people gathered in the hallways of Kyoto University, Dana is desperately going towards James. All the efforts and mischief of the freshman year were worthy. They emotionality held each other, when they knew that both have been selected as honor students, which is a great achievement since they are foreign students.
A Sakura Tree leads them to a childhood memory seventeen years ago in Caracas. They were sitting under a tree when James consoled her, they were ten years old. That was the day Dana’s mother went to their elementary school to explain why her daughter was absent the past week. James, holding little Dana into his arms, was trying to calm her, she was crying desperately.
One warm afternoon in Kyoto, after class, James and Dana were walking around the campus gardens. They watched a group of young graduates which were celebrating while going to the auditorium for their graduation ceremony. Their laughter and jokes leads Dana and James to their own undergraduate party in Central University of Venezuela. Only three years have passed since they received their degrees. That was a wonderful night, because they were finishing their careers and they could start working to accomplish their dream: going to Japan. Then, a slow music starts playing and the people start gathering at the tables to talk, James takes Dana by her arm and leads her to the dance floor. At the rhythm of the music and with a smooth talk, James decides to confess his love. Dana, with emotion and shame tears, dares to give him a kiss that, because of all the years of friendship, she had kept.
Walking by the Kyoto suburbs, James and Dana went inside a cyber coffeehouse to call their parents, to tell them that they had found an apartment and will start classes next week. James and Dana take turns on the phone so both of them could share every detail, curiosity and obstacle that they went through since their arrival in Japan. But they ran out of cash because they haven’t start working yet, and they had to end the call.
The smell of coffee and the taste of tears reminds them of one awful afternoon four years ago in Caracas, at James’ twenty-third birthday, when his father died on a terrible car accident. After the memorial, James’ family started fighting over the inheritance. Things got so bad that they even sued each other and grew apart. One afternoon after the lawyers read his father’s will, James met Dana at a coffeehouse to talk about it and find a way to go far away. There, between coffees and cigarettes, they made the decision of going to Japan.
A tree by the coffeehouse, brings them back to the same memory, seventeen years ago in Caracas. They were sitting under a tree when James consoled her, they were ten years old. That was the day Dana’s mother went to their elementary school to explain why her daughter was absent the past week. James, holding little Dana into his arms, was trying to calm her, she was crying desperately. Two teachers were talking nearby, about what had happened to the little girl. She was abducted and raped by two strangers for two days.
Outside Kyoto University, in a little restaurant on a boulevard surrounded by Sakura trees, in the middle of spring, Dana and James were celebrating over dinner their achievements of freshman year in Japan. After dessert, they were chatting happily while waiting for tea. Very carefully James gently slides a small box and opens it in the middle of the table, at Dana’s sight. With a serious tone of voice, he says: “I’m hoping you say ‘yes’, the one you promised me three years ago”.
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