Beneath The Lantern

🏮 Beneath The Lantern 🏮

🖋️ A Timeless Love Story by [Your name goes here]

📍 Setting: Kyoto, Japan – Present Day & Flashbacks to 1971

💔 Genre: Literary Romance / Cross-Cultural Historical Fiction

🌙 Themes: Lost Love • Memory • Fate • The Places That Remember Us

🍵 Naomi Ishikawa

A Kyoto tea house owner with a gentle soul and a past she never speaks of, Naomi keeps her heart locked away behind rituals, lanterns, and soft music that plays at dusk. To outsiders, she’s a gracious woman of grace and calm. But to herself, she’s still waiting.

For the boy who once stood beneath the paper lanterns and promised he’d come back.

📸 Thomas Llewellyn

In 1971, Thomas was a British exchange student who wandered into Naomi’s family tea house by accident and left with his world turned upside down. They were just teenagers—caught between cultures, curfews, and war protests. But what they had in that one summer was everything.

He promised to write.

He meant to return.

But life—messy, real, and unforgiving—had other plans.

Now, fifty years later, Thomas returns to Kyoto, carrying only a name, a photograph… and decades of what-ifs.

🏮 The Tea House Still Stands. So Does the Lantern.

Their reunion is quiet.

Their past, not.

Over matcha, old music, and painful silences, Naomi and Thomas must face:

• 🕯️ A love that never had a proper ending

• 📖 Letters that were written—but never sent

• 🏮 And the moment everything changed, beneath a single glowing lantern

💫 Some love stories flicker and fade.

🌙 Others wait patiently in the warm light—never forgotten, never extinguished.

📖 Read the first poignant chapter of Beneath the Lantern now at TheFirstChapter.shop

🔗 For readers who believe in long-lost love, cross-cultural connection, and the kind of stories that live quietly in your soul.