"Isao! Isao, stop right here! Wait for me!" Throwing an half-eaten sausage stick away, Lana Martin darted after her three-and-half years-old boy. 

In a blink, the bustling crowds who had taken over the old neighborhood of Asakusa swallowed him. Extreme annoyance and downright panic warred inside her. With those throngs of people around them and his eel-like agility... Thank goodness he's wearing a red shirt and green cap. But what is he running after? Oh, he's going to get an earful this time! Killing me like this!

It was nearly dusk, everyone had had already too much to drink to celebrate the end of the biggest religious festival of the summer in Tokyo. No choice then. Time to apply tactics tested and proven during her wild days of partying in cramped European clubs.

Cursing under her breath, she elbowed passersby to carve herself a way in the human-shaped wall around her without giving them a second thought. Merry people wearing colorful summer yukata moved slowly out her way.

Much too slowly. And dammit, she was already panting! Her abyssal lack of shape was ridiculous! Recovering from Nana's delivery wasn't as challenging as after Isao, but boy, for sure she wasn't thirty anymore.

"Isao! Come back here at once!" she shouted again, this time in Japanese, at the diminutive figure she glimpsed ahead of her.

Perfectly pointless. Her child kept slaloming between legs without any difficulty, and even less a glance for his red-faced mother. She didn't bother controlling her boiling anger anymore. Where are Naruhito and his booming voice when you need them? He would freeze the boy in his tracks.

Right when she plowed between a beer stand and a booth selling fried squid, her phone rang in her back pocket. Yuki's ringtone. Not even stopping, she grabbed it.

"Lana san, where are you?" her wife's sweet voice didn't soothe her nerves for once. "Goshujin sama and I are --"

"Yuki sama! Isao just... just ran in the crowd, I'm... I'm after him, but I can't catch up!"

"What? Where are you? What do you see?"

"Ah, I'm... I'm heading toward... Er... I think... the entrance of Tawaramachi station?" Her lack of familiarity with the entire area was infuriating.

"Don't lose him from your sight, we'll check the tracking app!"

Of course! Girl, are you stupid or what? Instant relief stole her breath away. Isao carried a small tracking device so they could pinpoint his location on their smartphone in emergencies just like this one. "Yes, do it! I'm too scared to look away from him!"

But to her abject terror, right then, Isao vanished from her line of sight. Heart in her throat, she cleared the huge crowd and stumbled upon a side street, frantically looking everywhere. With the festival and literally millions attending, neighboring roads were blocked to traffic, the lone piece of good news in this fresh hell of hers. Only a few couples and groups of friends strolled around the quiet road.

With a groan of relief, she spotted Isao's red shirt dozens of meters away on her left, right when he ran under a tall niomon wooden gate, one of the side entrances of a Buddhist temple.

"Isao! Stop now!" she bellowed even if it was useless, before turning to her phone again. "OK, he just stepped inside the courtyard of a pretty large temple, but I don't know its name!" Of all neighborhoods in Tokyo to get lost in, it had to be the one hosting dozens of shrines and temples.

"Don't worry, we'll find you!"

Fear swept away by downright aggravation, Lana rushed toward the temple, but slowed down once she was under the arch of the niomon.

There he was, crouching on the gravel, back against her.

Out of breath, hands cupping her burning face, Lana glanced up at the intricate ceiling of the gate, a prayer of gratitude on her lips. Her words died in her throat when her gaze fell on the statue of the Kongorikishi - a gigantic, wrestler-like guardian of Buddha - standing in the shadows of the right alcove of the gate.

In the dim light of the early evening and with rivulets of sweat blinding her, it was hard to make out the details of the statue. She swallowed hard. Brandishing a mallet, teeth bared, the wrathful deity had huge rolling eyes that caught the light and glistened. Turning to the left, she met the stern face of his twin companion. As tradition required, the mouth of the one of the right was open, the other's was shut. Their names escaped her but she remembered what this represented.

The birth and death of all things.

A shiver ran down her spine and she fought the urge to crawl under the condemning gaze of those two protectors against evil who, somehow, reminded her of Naruhito's mother. An overwhelming need to go home, put the kids to bed, and cuddle with her spouses made her head spin.

Shaking herself from her trance, she stepped outside the gate and in four strides, joined her stray child.

"Honda Isao san!" Lana's indignant cry came out like a rasp and not her intended show of parental authority. Still wheezing, she rubbed a painful point below her ribs. Coursing streets like a madwoman in the dead of Japanese summer was not her idea of fun. "Boy, we need to talk! Don't you - ever - run away like this! Do you hear me?"

Finally paying her attention, the chubby boy looked up and threw her a dazzling smile that melted her anger. Pure, intense relief gripped her heart. She fell on her knees on the sizzling hot gravel and engulfed him in a tight embrace. Silky hair dried up her tears. A long shudder shook her from head to toes.

"Mamma!" he giggled. "Cat! Isao found a cat!" Lo and behold, he held an adorable gray and white kitten by its tail. The feline sat in front of them and gave her a long-suffering look but didn't fight back.

"A cat? All of this because of a cat? Baby..." Lana closed her eyes and tried to calm down her racing heart and regulate her shallow breathing. "It's a cute kitty, but you can't run away like this without me, do you understand?"

"Isao keep it. Cat sleep in bed!"

Lana sighed and ruffled his hair. It would take a bit more time before important lessons could be driven home. At the end, all of this was her fault. "No, we can't take it home, because I'm sure another child is waiting for it. Come now," she said, standing up with Isao in her arms. "Say goodbye to the cat and let's go find otoh san and okaa san."

"Bye bye, cat! See you!" Isao nested in her arms and waving at the cat with enthusiasm, Lana headed back toward the street.

No sign of her spouses yet. More exhausted than she liked, Lana put her son down. Bemused but also a little wary, she watched him walk back under the gate to gawk at the two giant guardians. Their terrible faces clearly didn't scare him.

Her gaze fell on an itinerant monk standing on the other side of the entrance against the white wall running along the temple. Murmuring endless mantra, face hidden by a large and cone-shaped bamboo hat, he held a wooden bowl in his hands decorated by prayer beads. These men depended exclusively on charity, so Lana approached him with two notes of one thousand yen. Today, of all days, it felt right to pay forward a favor she had been granted.

As soon as the money was in the bowl, the monk turned silent and raised his head. Lana repressed an instinctive reaction to step back. Two milky-white eyes topping a lined and emaciated tanned face bored into hers. Razor-thin lips stretched, revealing toothless gums.

"Beware the path of love, lest it becomes the path of death." Carried by a powerful voice, his words rang clear and sharp. And then it was over. He lowered his head and went on chanting.

Cold sweat broke on Lana's back and forehead. Mouth dry, at a total loss, she could only gape at the man. Haunting memories of past brushes with other creepy messengers, some allies, some enemies, rushed forward. We're supposed to be done with all of this!

"Lana san! Finally!" Yuki's voice shook Lana from her transe. Her spouses were jogging down the street to catch up with her, Yuki holding Nana in a baby carrier in front of her.

"Isao, come, we're leaving," Lana told her son who was still under the gate. This time, he complied right away and ran to her open arms.

"Bye bye!" he said, waving again his little hand at something behind her. The cat, most certainly.

"Are you all right?" Yuki asked her, clearly worried, when they were reunited.

"Yes, don't worry. Flustered, stressed, walking on jelly legs, but I'm fine. This sprint nearly killed me, though."

"You're indeed flushed red and sweating," Naruhito pointed out with a frown while she handed him Isao. She barely repressed an eyeroll. He was never one to soothe her bruised ego. "It is high time you start running laps and doing push-ups again. We will begin with series of twenty as early as tomorrow."

"Twenty? Oh no, I can't!"

"Thirty then."

"What? Goshujin sama, why are you doing this to me?"

"Forty."

"All right, all right! Stop, please! My arms hurt already."