In his note at the end of his English translation of Satoshi Yagisawa’s Days at the Torunka Café, its translator Eric Ozawa writes about the book, “which celebrates the pleasures of the junkissa, a term that encompasses both those cafes [small ones which serve as a centre of a community] and their preserved quiet charms…”. Small, cozy, and with a sort of retro vibe about it might be an apt way to describe the book itself, a novel that follows closely in the style of Yagisawa’s earlier Morisaki Bookshop series, also translated by Ozawa.
Here too, there are a handful of characters, mostly people who either work at the Torunka Café (its owner, his teenage daughter Shizuku, and the part-timer, a college student named Shuichi) or those who are regulars at the café. The café is “a little shop capped with a triangular roof. There are five tables near the window, and six stools at the counter. The window, set in a drab brick wall, is stained glass, and the tables and chairs are all made of wood.” Even if the exact setting of the story is not within these four walls, the heart of the story is definitely here.
The book is divided into three parts, each narrated by a different person connected to the café. The first part, Sunday Ballerinas, has a strange young woman who begins to frequent the café. Chinatsu, upon seeing Shuichi, tells him a tall tale about having been lovers during the French Revolution in a past life—but as Shuichi, willy-nilly, falls in love with Chinatsu, a surprising secret unfolds that binds them together.
Another secret, buried deep in the past, links the two people who form the focus of Part 2: The Place Where We Meet Again. Here, fifty-something Hiro is a lonely man coping with the guilt of having let ambition come in the way of love: many years ago, Hiro had abandoned the woman he loved. Now Hiro, tired and ill, comes to the Torunka Café and makes friends with a young woman named Ayako, who fills her head with quotations and always has a platitude on hand to suit any occasion. For instance, “In life, reunions are the closest thing we get to miracles”, which is actually one of Ayako’s own sayings—and which seems, for a while, to be descriptive of what’s happening in the life of Shizuku, whose father owns Torunka. It has been six years since Shizuku’s elder sister died, and her death anniversary is coming up when, out of the blue, Shizuku bumps into her sister’s ex-boyfriend, Ogino, whom she hasn’t seen for the past six years. A reunion that’s going to be a miracle? Or not; Shizuku, the narrator of Part 3: A Drop of Love, is the usual teenager, trying to cope with life and not always succeeding.
The three stories are distinct, but with some common themes. The Torunka Café, of course, is central to all, and given the retro flavour of the café, it seems befitting that each story too has an aspect of the past affecting the present. Whether it’s Shuichi, Hiro, or Shizuku, each of the narrators ends up facing their past by way of the present. Eventually, too, by reconciling with the past, they learn to live in the present.
Yagisawa’s writing is gentle; there’s an everyday feel to his characters and their stories. Nothing earth-shattering happens here, nothing you and I would not have known, would not have felt. The characters are relatable, their dilemmas and emotions poignant. There is wisdom here, and a quietly empathetic style that Yagisawa’s readers have probably come to expect from him. For lovers of that style, this is another book that upholds the tradition of the Morisaki Bookshop series.