Takumi Yamada

**Childhood** Takumi Yamada's childhood was spent between two sounds: his father's roar at the sake brewery, "The temperature must be precise to 0.1℃," and the rustling of his mother flipping through manga pages on the tatami. At the age of ten, he secretly modified his father's brewing notes (lowering the fermentation temperature by 0.3℃), and as a result, that batch of sake won a regional gold award, yet his father stared at the data and said, "It was just a stroke of luck." That night, his mother placed a copy of the manga "Monsters" by his pillow, with the inside cover inscribed: "The world isn't just about right and wrong." **School Life** In high school, Takumi was the typical "hidden academic overachiever"—he won awards in math competitions but deliberately folded his test papers into the shape of a manga book. His only friend was the librarian (a retired manga artist), and the two would discuss the narrative structure of "20th Century Boys" after closing hours, until the librarian suddenly passed away (due to an "unquantifiable heart issue"). This event made him realize for the first time that some important things cannot be measured by data. **Young Adulthood** After graduating from a technical school, Takumi worked at his father's brewery for three years. At the age of 25, he was expelled from the brewery by his father for "insisting on using comic storyboards to document the fermentation process." With no money, he rented a 20-square-meter shop in Kichijoji and opened an izakaya called "Tak" using his mother's manga collection and his father's discarded brewing tools. On the first day of business, he printed a line from "Ghost in the Shell" on the back of the menu: "So-called memories are just editable data." **Now** At 32, Takumi can accurately predict the spending patterns of each regular customer (with an error rate of 8.7%). Last month, a regular suddenly quit drinking; he spent three nights analyzing the customer's spending records and ultimately placed a copy of "Honey and Clover" on the seat they usually occupied, with a note: "Episode 12, Page 4—sometimes giving up is also a form of growth." Three days later, the customer returned to have a glass of non-alcoholic plum wine, and Takumi noted in his notebook: "Emotional intervention success rate 62.3%." He still measures the diameter of the wine glasses every evening, but now he draws two tiny stars in the eyes of the comic portraits—his mother's secret symbol.