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Tales From the Cafe
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Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Lovers”
Although most people don’t travel to the future because it is extremely unlikely to meet the person they are looking for, Katsuki Kurata has traveled to the present-day café from the past on Christmas Day. Miki decorates the Christmas tree with tanzaku, folded paper on which wishes are written, while conversing with Kyoko, Nagare, and Kazu. Miki asks Kurata if he is waiting for his friend Fumiko, whom Nagare has just tried to call and who promised to be here. He says no. Miki tells Kurata that Fumiko finally got married to her boyfriend, Goro (whom she visits in the past in Before the Coffee Gets Cold). Kurata is delighted to learn about Fumiko’s marriage.
Kurata says that he is waiting for a colleague, Asami Mori, whom Fumiko promised to bring to the café. He says that they were engaged, but he didn’t think they would get married now. He recalls getting to know Asami. She confided in him about a pregnancy loss, and he told her that she could give the lost child meaning if she tried to be happy. Fumiko calls, and based on Kurata’s side of the conversation, it appears that he won’t be able to meet Asami. He prepares to return to the past.
He remembers being diagnosed with leukemia just when he was planning to propose to Asami. He was given six months to live and decided to start treatment while keeping his diagnosis a secret from her. He remembers planning his trip to the future. He asked Fumiko to bring Asami to the café in two and a half years if he were dead at that time. He tells her not to bring Asami if he does not die or if “[she] is married and is living a happy life” after his passing (180).
Just before he drinks the rest of the coffee, Asami rushes in. Fumiko has told her about his diagnosis, and she is angry with him for his secrecy. It has been two years since he died, and she is married now. Kurata finishes his coffee and returns to the past.
Fumiko comes into the café. She remembers agonizing over what to tell Asami about Kurata’s plan. While Asami had not actually married, Fumiko doesn’t believe that she let Kurata’s death prevent her from living her life or that marriage is the only metric by which to judge happiness. On Goro’s advice, Fumiko told Asami about Kurata’s plan. She thought Asami wasn’t going to go meet him, but she asked to borrow Fumiko’s wedding ring at the last minute. At the café, Asami tells Fumiko that she remembers the advice Kurata gave her about her pregnancy loss. Similarly, she decides to be happy to give Kurata’s life meaning.
Nagare closes the café early. Kazu stays and thinks about her mother, Kaname. She felt guilty after pouring the coffee that allowed her mother to return to the past, and she has had a subconscious death wish for many years. She remembers standing beside train tracks and thinking about walking toward the crossing gate. Kinuyo came and expressed her support by saying, “Take me with you” (198), and Kazu stopped feeling so alone.
Chapter 3 Analysis
Kawaguchi began his career as a playwright, and Tales from the Café has many formal similarities to a play rather than a novel. For example, this chapter includes a scene between Miki and Kazu in which Miki asks about Kazu’s intention to change her name if she gets married:
‘If I get married.’ Responding to Miki in her usual cool way, she carried on wiping glasses. ‘Oh… I see,’ Miki replied. It was unclear what Miki “saw,” but she nodded and returned to the seat at the counter to start writing some more wishes for the tanzaku. Beep-boop beep-boop… Beep-boop beep-boop… The phone began ringing from the back room. Kazu was about to go and answer it, but Nagare put his hand up to stop her and disappeared into the back room himself. Beep-boop… Kurata dropped his eyes to the tabletop and stared at what he had written on his tanzaku (166).
Like a play, this passage focuses mainly on dialogue and does not include the characters’ thought processes or the narrator’s interpretation of what is happening. Other than the dialogue, it includes gestures and sound effects. The detail with which Kawaguchi describes characters’ movements creates a vivid scene as if they are stage directions that an actor could portray. Rather than only descriptions like, “the phone began ringing,” the passage includes the onomatopoetic sound of the phone. Again, this makes the passage experiential in a way that is similar to watching a play. Finally, the passage is theatrical in the sense of what is obscured from the reader. Kurata drops his eyes to stare at what he wrote, but the passage does not include details about what that actually is. Like in a play, the audience only has access to what they can see or hear on the stage. While the novel does include characters’ interiority and other aspects of novelistic form, its theatrical traits enhance its experiential quality.
This chapter develops the Happiness as a Choice theme of the novel. The key turning point in Kurata and Asami’s relationship is the unexpected support he provides after she experiences a pregnancy loss. Rather than condolences, Kurata “[points] out a way Asami could change the way she thought about the grief that she was experiencing” and tells her that choosing to be happy will create meaning for the child’s lost life (169). The trajectory of this theme across the novel’s chapters is from instruction in Chapter 1 to a choice with higher stakes in Chapter 2 to direct meaning-making in Chapter 3. Kurata’s advice suggests that it is not only possible to affect one’s own happiness and thereby their future by choosing to be happy but that happiness is also an effective way to honor the dead. This foreshadows the conclusion to this theme in the subsequent chapter. When Kazu decides to be happy in Chapter 4, she affects her own future and honors Kaname, but she also releases her mother from her ghostly existence.
Kurata also disrupts the established time-travel conventions in the novel by traveling from the past to the future. This reversal emphasizes the theme of Changing the Future Versus Changing the Self. While changing events in the past does not change the future in Tales from the Café, Kurata’s journey to the future does create the possibility for change in the narrative present. Fumiko’s mourning for Kurata has been informed by his secrecy in the past. Now armed with the truth, Fumiko can heal in a way she could not before. Thus, Kurata changes Fumiko’s future by giving her the chance to choose happiness as a way of honoring his memory.
Chapter 3 also represents the convergence of past and current plot events and character arcs. Kurata’s plan to meet Asami relies on their shared work colleague, Fumiko, who appears in the first chapter of Before the Coffee Gets Cold. She returns to the past to see her ex-boyfriend, Goro, and as a result of her conversation with him, she decides to wait for him to come back from a three-year stint in America. After that, their story remains ambiguous. Fumiko’s reappearance in Tales from the Café is both important to the new plotline of Kurata and Asami’s meeting and provides closure for the plotline of the first novel in the series. She has since married Goro, and the pair appear to be happy together. This linking of novels in the series expands the narrative’s world, imbuing the text with qualities of the epic.
This chapter progresses from the previous section’s reference to autumn into winter, taking place on Christmas Day. Kurata is wearing “knee-length shorts and a T-shirt with beach sandals on his feet” because he has come from a different season in the past (154). The inclusion of people meeting from different seasons as well as different years adds another element of tangible everydayness to the novel’s magical realism. Similarly, Asami’s appearance from the outside with snow on her coat foreshadows the next chapter, in which Miki finds springtime cherry blossoms a customer has left. The clear seasonal changes throughout the novel function as a symbol for the characters’ transformations and cyclical life changes.
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By Toshikazu Kawaguchi
