I wasn't that keen to read 'Days at the Torunka Café' 「純喫茶ルンカ」(2022) by Satoshi Yagisawa, translated into English by Eric Ozawa and that version was published in late 2025. Then I thought to myself, 'How bad can it be?' Well... ... instant regret. I didn't enjoy this book as much as the author's 'Days at the Morisaki Bookshop' (2009).
These three interconnected stories are about regret, self-worth vs one's identity, positivity, second chances, change, future, the sorts. There isn't a resolution. Whether you like them, is another thing. We simply see people picking up the pieces and getting on with their lives, preferably with a perfect cup of coffee.
At the end of a tiny alley in Tokyo, Torunka Café that plays Chopin's piano études is run by Isao Tachibana alongside his teenaged daughter Shizuku, and a part-timer 21-year-old Shūichi Okuyama. Shizuku herself is also coping with grief over the loss of her elder sister Sumiré, and the strong emotions of an unrequited first crush on her sister's ex-boyfriend vs the steadfast support of her childhood friend Kōta. That was elaborated in the last story 'A Drop of Love'.
The first story 'Sunday Ballerinas' saw Shūichi being enamored with a regular customer 24-yar-old Chinatsu Yukimura. I had no idea where this story was going. It was so meandering that I lost interest in the book promptly. Chinatsu comes in to the cafe once a week, and usually on a Sunday. She folds the napkins into tiny ballerinas. She hides a vulnerability from past trauma and heartbreak. She told Shūichi some odd story about them being acquainted in a past life during the French revolution, as French people of another gender and they were lovers. I had to laugh.
Then we learnt that Chinatsu and Shūichi were acquainted as children, when his father came to visit her mother. The adult parents were lovers. Chinatsu's mother passed away, and she was curious about how Shūichi was doing in Tokyo, and she came to look for him. She wasn't sure how the friendship would turn out. She simply wanted to see him because she's had a terrible childhood and she had felt better when he was around. There was redemption suggested at the end of the story.
The second story 'The Place Where We Meet Again' saw Hiroyuki Numata meet Ayako, who is the daughter of the woman named Sanae he had dated 30 years ago. Hiro and Sanae had a relationship, but he literally ghosted Sanae and broke up with her, citing his work obligations and ambitions. He later married a shallow gaudy woman who was good for his career, but not good for anything else. Yet she refused to let him divorce her. He became an alcoholic and spiraled.
Hiro regretted not doing more for Sanae. He used private investigators to track down Sanae, only to learn that she had long passed from cancer. He had randomly hoped to run into her daughter, Ayako.
That's all it took to lift my spirits so much it was actually a little disconcerting. I felt like I'd found a new reason to stay in the neighborhood. Until I'd spoken with Ayako, I'd spent my time there, unable to get my bearings, feeling like a stranger in a strange land. But once I'd started talking to her, the distance I felt between me and everyone in the neighborhood seemed to go away, and I felt like I was part of things again. More than anything else, that's what made me happy.
We learnt about Shizuku's pain in the last story 'A Drop of Love'. Her elder sister Sumiré had died ten years ago when she was seventeen. Now that Shizuku's almost seventeen and in her second year at high school, she missed her sister even more. Sumiré had fallen sick and was hospitalized; she died three months later. To cope with grief, her mother now lives away from her and the father. Her mother joined an NGO and now lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Every year, at the end of August, on the anniversary of Sumi's death, Shizuku becomes a bundle of nerves and couldn't function. The first year after Sumi's death was the hardest. In this story, we're now at the sixth anniversary.
One afternoon out and about in town, she ran into Kazuhiko Ogino, her sister's ex-boyfriend whom the family lost contact with when the sister died. Shizuku sat down with him to ask why they broke up. She didn't understand what went on between them, except that she was jealous of their closeness and bewildered by how much he cried at Sumiré's funeral. And then, she thought she might have a crush on Ogino! She took Sumi's clothes, shoes and hair clips, and began dressing like Sumi. It took her a long while to decide that she wouldn't do so anymore. She confessed to Ogino that she liked him, but she was rejected. But after that, she felt much lighter.
Outside the window, the landscape flew by. As hard as it was to believe that after the last several days, my mind was now calm and clear.
But I won't forget that I was in love, however briefly it lasted. Deeply in love. And it's something I'll treasures. Even if the pain returns, it won't be so bad. Someday, I know, I'll fall in love again. And until that day, I'll be building up my confidence. So that when the time comes, whoever it is will see me for who I am.
Readers are offered a peek into these characters' lives, emotions and how they deal with the developments, other people's feelings and such. I don't know if I care for them. Reaching the end of the book didn't make me like them better.
It isn't an utter waste of time reading it. It's kinda like a window into friends' lives whom we wouldn't know even if they're good friends. Some things are kept aside, kept private, and grief is sometimes not said. I sometimes don't need to know everything about friends. I only want to know if they choose to share. I'm not particularly nosy. And often, depending on one's concept or expectations of friendship, I would likely come across as not caring very much. Whatever it is, it isn't my type of book.
How and what you make of a cup of coffee, is up to you. In the 'Translator's Note', Eric Ozawa said,
In the book, the café is quite small, with some seats at the counter and a handful of ta-bles, but like the Morisaki Bookshop, it's the center of a community of people for whom it becomes a second home.
Time seems to move differently at the Torunka Café. There's time to savor a cup of coffee, to reminisce, to confess a secret, or to read a book like this one, which celebrates the pleasures of the junkissa, a term that encompasses both those cafés and their preserved quaint charms of the Showa period as well as those distinguished by a devotion to the perfect cup of coffee.
