41 pages • 1 hour read
Toshikazu KawaguchiTales From the Cafe
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Changing the Future Versus Changing the Self
Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to suicide and pregnancy loss.
A key aspect of the novel is the set of rules those wishing to time travel from the café must follow. Specifically, the fact that it is impossible to change the present by visiting the past is unique to this series. Whereas many novels that feature time travel focus on how subtle actions undertaken in the past affect the future, Tales from the Café subverts this trope by emphasizing that the present and future cannot be changed. Nonetheless, characters undergo internal changes as a result of their journeys.
Because characters know in advance that they won’t be able to change the present, the novel emphasizes their unique motivations for time travel. Usually, these motivations are interpersonal and center around seeing the person one more time or saying something they wish they had said earlier. For example, Kyoko wants to set things right with her brother but doesn’t go back in time to do so because it would have no effect. Because her brother is still alive, she can only heal their relationship by speaking to him in the present. However, Yukio does choose to travel back in time to see his mother because he didn’t get to talk to her before she died. While his interactions with her don’t change the present, they offer him closure and a chance to heal from his grief, similar to the way talk therapy can provide strategies for reconciling with one’s past. Similarly, Kiyoshi is initially baffled by why people would choose to return to the past despite the rules. Although he realizes that he can’t save his wife’s life, Kiyoshi ultimately decides to return to the past to give her a gift for her last birthday and finally move past his decades-long grief.
Throughout the novel, Kawaguchi suggests that events cannot be changed because of travel to the past, but people and relationships can. For example, when Gohtaro visits the past, he is unable to prevent Shuichi from dying by warning him about the car accident. Because both men are familiar with the rules of the café’s time travel, he does not attempt to do so. However, before returning to the past, Gohtaro intended to remove himself from Haruka’s life and remain miserable. After speaking with Shuichi, Gohtaro plans to tell Haruka the truth about her birth father but continue acting as a father figure for her, per Shuichi’s instructions and his own wishes. Therefore, while the present remains unchanged by time travel, Gohtaro himself changes, so his future will change accordingly. Kawaguchi therefore emphasizes the importance of human agency rather than magic in affecting the future. By exploring characters’ motivations for returning to the past and emphasizing characters’ internal changes, Kawaguchi suggests that subtle interpersonal and internal changes can be as significant as high-stakes, future-altering actions.
Happiness as a Choice
Throughout the novel, Kawaguchi emphasizes the characters’ agency in choosing to be happy. Each time-traveling character in the novel faces a choice about whether to be happy or miserable. For example, the decision to move from guilt to happiness is the centerpiece of Kazu’s character arc in the novel. Through explorations of happiness as a choice, Kawaguchi emphasizes the importance of mindset in dictating characters’ futures. This theme is related to Changing the Future Versus Changing the Self. The changes to characters generally involve the decision to let themselves be happy. Therefore, the novel emphasizes that the decision to attain happiness is a type of magic that can affect the future. Kawaguchi suggests that it is sometimes possible to choose happiness over misery, and doing so can positively impact the future.
Kawaguchi provides increasingly detailed and complex portrayals of happiness as a choice. In the first chapter, Shuichi correctly identifies that his friend has been “suffering inside [his] head the entire time” and directly instructs Gohtaro to “Be happy!” (76, 77). Kawaguchi suggests that the choice to be happy will affect Gohtaro’s actions, and indeed, he chooses to remain in Haruka’s life rather than distancing himself after revealing the truth about her father. In the second chapter, Yukio faces a similar choice between suffering and happiness. In his case, the stakes are even higher because he plans to travel to the past to see his mother, and then allow the coffee to get cold to die by suicide. After he returns to the present, he feels lighter and notes that “[h]is despair at life had metamorphosed into hope. His outlook had changed unrecognizably. The world hasn’t changed, I have…” (149). Yukio chooses happiness instead of death, and the next chapter reveals that he returns to Tokyo and begins a new job after this event.
In the second two chapters, representations of happiness as a choice are more explicit and complex. In Chapter 3, Kurata tells Asami to choose happiness after experiencing a pregnancy loss as a way to honor her child: “[I]f you try to find happiness after this, then this child will have put those seventy days toward making you happy […] Therefore, you absolutely must try to be happy” (169-70). Similarly, in Chapter 4, the result of Kiyoshi’s investigation into those who travel to the past is that he decides he can better honor his wife through his happiness than his guilt. Kazu’s epiphanic moment as a character, and the book’s emotional climax, is her decision to be happy. She realizes that she has been afraid of being happy since pouring the coffee that led to her mother’s death. She then decides, “I am going to be happy” (255), which also frees Kaname from her purgatory. Kawaguchi thus emphasizes the importance of happiness as a choice, both for the character’s futures and as a means of honoring the dead.
The Importance of Ritual
Ritual is a significant element in the novel. Kawaguchi represents rituals around coffee preparation in general, particularly the ritual of preparing coffee for those who want to return to the past. Ritual is closely connected to notions of lineage and inheritance, and it plays an important for Kazu’s journey as she pays penance for what happened to her mother. Kawaguchi emphasizes both the importance and potential effect of ritual through this theme.
The recitation of the rules is an important element of ritual in the novel. Even when characters are regulars or are otherwise familiar with the café, the rules are always repeated, first by Kazu and later by Miki. These time travel rules align with the novel’s subversion of tropes. Rather than being unexpected or dramatic, the experience of time travel is controlled and preceded by predictable rituals of rule recitation and coffee pouring. The coffee-pouring ritual is also important to notions of matrilineal connection and inheritance. Miki is excited for her turn to pour the coffee when she turns seven as “[t]he pourer of the coffee not only had to be a woman of the Tokita family, but she also had to be at least seven years of age” (217). When Miki finally has her chance, Nagare asks Kiyoshi to humor her in her recitation of the rules, which he anticipates will be overdramatic. The coffee pouring ritual functions as a passing of the baton from Kazu, who has functioned as a maternal figure for Miki, to the next generation. Combined with Kazu’s pregnancy, this passing down of rituals represents the family’s enduring legacy and the café’s continued role in helping customers find emotional healing.
Ritual is also important to Kazu’s journey. Her performance of ritual functions as penance because she feels responsible for her mother’s death: “She devote[s] herself to the café. She [does] not ask for anything else, she [does] not hope for anything else. She only live[s] to pour coffee. That [is] her way of punishing herself for what happened to her mother” (251). Kazu’s insistence on performing the time travel rituals is a way to echo her mother’s experience of being trapped in the café as a spectral presence. Similarly, Kazu takes up a new ritual of replacing her mother’s novel once she finishes it, perpetuating her stay in the café. Kawaguchi represents a complex notion of ritual and suggests that “carrying out acts of mourning allows us not to forget” (157), though it can become obsessive and detrimental as well. Ritual functions positively through its connection to tradition and lineage, as represented by Miki’s pride and excitement about pouring the coffee. Conversely, it is a negative form of self-imposed suffering for Kazu. Kawaguchi thus suggests that ritual has powerful effects, which can be both positive and negative.
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