Page count: 224 pages
Rating: 1.5 stars
Warning! This review will contain spoilers, because after my book club discussion yesterday, I'm actually quite cranky about this book, and it's impossible for me to rant properly if I can't spoil the heck out of these stories. Don't worry, you don't actually want to read this book anyway.
In a small, dark basement café in Japan, visitors can travel briefly back in time, if they observe a series of very careful rules.
- They can only go back to meet and interact with someone who has also been to the café.
- Nothing that happens in the past will change the present. No matter what they go back to do or say, the present will remain unchanged
- They have to sit in one specific seat in the café. This seat is usually occupied by a silent lady reading a book. The lady is in fact a ghost, and if you try to forcefully move her, she will place a curse on you. She leaves her seat about once a day, to visit the toilet (and yes, you can keep giving her coffee to speed the process along), that's when a person has their chance.
- You cannot leave the seat when you are in the past, then you will immediately be returned to the present.
- You travel back to the past when you are poured a cup of a special coffee. You have only until the coffee gets cold before you have to return. You also have to drink the entire cup of coffee, or you become a ghost and replace the current ghost lady.
- You only get to do the time travel thing ONCE - no do-overs.
Suffice it to say, most people can't actually be bothered, considering all the rules and how short a time they get to visit a past moment in their lives. Nevertheless, this book is split into four stories, with four different people who choose to use the magical option.
The first story is called The Lovers. At the start of it, a couple go to the café and the man dumps the woman. Quite a lot is made of how beautiful and accomplished the woman is (she could apparently be a model on the cover of magazines). Nevertheless, she is dumped by her programmer boyfriend who is going to America for a job. A week later, she's back at the café, desperate for a chance to go back in time, because she froze when confronted by the bad news, and she never got a chance to tell her man "Don't go!". You'd think a beautiful, successful woman (who it is described always has guys trying to get her attention) would look at what a big sea there was out there for her to explore, and how many figurative fish there were in said sea for her to potentially date. But no, even knowing that going back in time will NOT CHANGE the present, so her man will still be off in America pursuing his career rather than being with her, she chooses to go.
By the end of her time travel meeting, he tells her to wait, and he'll be back in three years. The point of a lot of the first story is obviously info-dumping for the readers how the time travel thing actually works. We also get flashbacks to the couple's early days of their relationship. It seems it took something like ten coffee dates for the guy to even realise they were dating, so he wasn't the most perceptive of dudes. Our beautiful, kind, and successful career lady, who could clearly find a more deserving man at the drop of a hat is perfectly happy to be kept on the hook for THREE years, waiting for a guy who didn't have the guts to tell her he was going to America until the SAME DAY he was leaving.
The second story is about a husband and wife, who have both appeared as supporting characters in the first story. The husband is a landscape gardener who suffers from Alzheimer's. He frequently spends his days in the café, reading gardening magazines and taking notes. His wife, a nurse, comes in to pick him up, but a lot of the time recently, he no longer remembers who she is. Someone overhears him saying he wants to use the time travel chair to give his wife a letter. So she decides to go back in time instead, and while you can't change anything about the present by visiting the past, you can apparently take back objects without any difficulties. She meets her husband of several years ago, and he gives her a letter. The letter is significant because, in their relationship, she was always the one who wrote long intricate letters. He is apparently barely literate and would normally respond to her with just a sentence or two. But now he's written her a letter, and it's all about how he knows that he's sick and his greatest fear is that she because she is a nurse, will stop being his wife once he stops remembering her, and just act in the role of his carer and nurse. He doesn't want that, and pretty much gives her his blessing to move on with her life, if need be. Wifey is very touched and insists that everyone go back to calling her by her married name. She proceeds to basically go on dates with her husband, whether he remembers her or not
The third story is about two sisters. Another of the recurring characters in the stories is a woman who frequently sits at the counter with her hair in curlers. She runs a hostess bar nearby and is clearly an exuberant person. It's mentioned that she makes people feel comfortable and welcome, and that's one of the reasons the little hostess bar she runs is so successful. Hostess lady has a younger sister, who comes around every few months, trying to see her older sister. During her most recent visit, Hostess lady hid behind the counter for several hours, just to avoid seeing her. This is because Hostess lady is convinced her younger sister must hate her. Their parents owned a successful inn somewhere in the countryside and always expected older sister to take over and run it one day. But she wanted no such thing and left the family about a decade ago, so now her parents have pretty much disowned her, and it became the younger sister's duty to run the inn. Hostess lady is convinced her younger sister hates her because she is stuck fulfilling the wishes of their parents, while Hostess lady is off in the big city, enjoying a life of independence.
The reason Hostess lady suddenly wants to travel back in time is that younger sister dies. She's killed in a car accident on her way back from the city, and now Hostess lady's parents hate her even more, because they blame her for their youngest daughter's death. Hostess lady feels bad that she kept trying to avoid awkward conversations, so she wants to go back to her sister's last meeting and tell her she loves her. This time, when the sister arrives, Hostess lady is sitting in the magic time travel chair and they have a heartfelt conversation. Turns out little sister doesn't hate Hostess lady, she just misses her and had always dreamed of the two of them running the inn together. Which is sweet, I guess. Now comes the bit that's less sweet. After returning to the present, Hostess lady (who has spent the last decade or so happily living an independent life in the city, desperately avoiding having to run an inn in the countryside just to please her parents) decides that she must return and beg her parents' forgiveness and take over running the inn in the countryside, because it was her sister's dying wish. Which it wasn't even! Her sister (now dead) dreamed of them running the inn TOGETHER. Little sister is dead, it's sad and tragic and a horrible waste. Hostess lady pretty much ran away from home so she wouldn't have to ever succeed her parents and become an inn manager. They already hate her - so what if they hate her a bit more and blame her wrongfully for her sister's death? Instead of staying in the city, enjoying her single lifestyle, and doing her dream job, she goes back home and becomes an inn manager. But it's ok, she sends the people at the café a picture where she looks happy - so everything ended up OK in the end? Really... that's the moral here?
The fourth story is about the wife of the café owner, who is portrayed as this friendly, cheerful woman, who has always been sickly and in and out of hospital because of a weak heart. Now she's pregnant, but it's obvious that the pregnancy is taking a massive toll on her. Her husband doesn't want to make a choice between his wife or the baby (i.e. tell her to get an abortion), and the wife wants this baby, even if she is most likely going to die giving birth to it. Wifey wants to use the very unusual option of going FORWARD in time, a much more tricky situation, as when you go back in time, you can think about a specific event, where you know the person you want to meet will be there. Going forward in time - who knows what will happen?
The waitress who works at the café, and who is always the one to pour the special coffee for the time travelers, promises Wifey that she will make sure her daughter is in the café at the agreed-upon time and place in the future. Even so, there is a mix-up, with the date and time, and neither the waitress nor Wifey's husband is present when she pops into the future. The café even seems to be run by someone else. However, in a stroke of luck for Wifey (it's her only chance to travel in time, remember?), her daughter appears to be working in the café part-time and enters with enough time for her mother to see her and talk to her. Instead of jumping forward to when her daughter would be about ten, Wifey has jumped to when her daughter is a teenager. A teenager who has actually appeared in the café as a time traveler to the past, showing up to take a selfie with herself and Wifey (no one understood the significance at the time). Wifey is reassured that her daughter is doing well and that neither she nor her father seems to resent Wifey for the choice of having a baby, and then leaving her husband as a widower and single father, and her daughter mother-less. In fact, it seems like the woman from story nr one, The Lovers, now works in the café and has been something of a foster mother for the daughter. So maybe she doesn't get back with her dead-beat boyfriend? Who knows?
One of the members of my book club ended up listening to the entire series of these books (there are four translated into English so far) and while he agreed that on the surface, some of these stories might seem quite nice, the core values expressed by the author throughout the stories are deeply conservative and pretty much all amount to women conforming to the traditional values of good wives and daughters. If a sacrifice has to be made, it's always the woman who makes it. I didn't think too hard about the various stories as I read the book (during the two days before our book club meeting), but during our one-hour discussion, we discussed each of the stories in more depth and agreed that most of them ended up being quite unsettling. This was supposed to be a nice, cozy winter read, and instead turned out to be a rallying call for the patriarchy, apparently. So I'm not going to apologise for spoiling all the stories. I don't plan to read any more from the author, and I don't think anyone else should either.
Judging a book by its cover: The cover image doesn't capture the fact that on the hardback copies at least, the teal green is all shimmery, and the wallpaper looks like actual brocade. This is still a cozy cover, but the hardback book is so pretty. The cat on the cover is a total lie, however. There is no cat at any point in any of the stories. They'd probably be better if there had been. Most books are better with cats.
