Rika Matsuda was 7 when she was given a new bicycle and raced off to try it out in a park.
The brakes failed. She crashed into a wall, her foot turned purple, and she had to sit down, hurting and alone. A few minutes later, a man who looked to be about 20 approached her. She remembers him as big, muscular, and wearing a suit, and she wasn’t sure she could trust a stranger. Even so, he took her to a water fountain, helped her wash her wound, and lent her his phone so she could call her grandfather.
While they waited, he took a sheet of paper from his bag and showed her how to make an origami crane. When her grandfather arrived, the man accompanied them to the girl’s house. When they said goodbye, he said nothing: he smiled and handed her the crane.
She kept it on her desk and, from time to time, looked at it and remembered that act of kindness. Ten years later, at 17 and already in high school, she thought that perhaps the man had written something on the paper while she was talking with her grandfather. She ran home from school, unfolded the crane, and found a very well-known Japanese expression: “We must cherish every encounter, because it may never happen again.”
Matsuda calls him her anonymous hero, and she never learned his name.
