Tales From the Cafe

Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to suicide and pregnancy loss.

“All sorts of tales are told about it, even today, like the one about the woman who went back to see the boyfriend she had split up from, or the sister who returned to see her younger sister, who had been killed in a car crash, and the wife who traveled to see her husband who had lost his memory.”

This passage summarizes the plot of the previous book while clarifying the history of the café. Kawaguchi uses simple, colloquial language in “like the one about the” to emphasize the contrast between the magic of the café and its everydayness. The passage is also a run-on sentence, which syntactically emphasizes the number of times patrons have returned to the past.

“Kazu stared at him in this state. ‘What happens afterwards?’ she asked quietly. She wanted to know what would happen after he revealed that he was not her true father.

Gohtaro felt a jolt in his heart. The waitress won’t be fooled by lies. He spoke while staring into space, as if he had prepared his answer. ‘I can only see it being the end of my role,’ he said with quiet resignation.”

This quote shows the third-person omniscient narration used in the novel. Both Kazu’s and Gohtaro’s thoughts are revealed in the same passage. While Kawaguchi uses dialogue and gestures more than interiority, subtle references to characters’ mental and emotional states, like Gohtaro feeling “a jolt in his heart,” are used sparingly to create emphasis. The passage also foreshadows the conflict in Gohtaro’s story and his decision to remain in Haruka’s life, as well as Kazu’s journey regarding her guilt about her mother’s death.

“His hands, his body, were becoming one with the steam from the coffee. It had not been his surroundings that were rippling and shimmering; it had been him. Suddenly, his surroundings began to move so that everything above him was falling past him with amazing speed. Experiencing all this, he screamed out, ‘Stop stop!’ He was no good with scary rides—the mere sight of them was enough to make him swoon—but unfortunately for him, his surroundings seemed to be going past him faster and faster, as time wound back twenty-two years.”

Kawaguchi provides a visceral physical description of the process of going back in time. The connection between Gohtaro’s disappearing body and the coffee’s steam grounds the magical description of time travel in the commonplace elements of the café. The narrative voice remains practical and matter-of-fact despite the content.