2022 Catch-up Review: Tales from the Café #2

Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the Café by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm just done with the first story, The Best Friend. I cannot describe what feelings it has left me with. It is something similar to some anime I have watched years ago that have a very mercurial and whimsical feel to them. My experience of Japanese writers (and anime I have watched in the past), though little, has brought me to this conclusion -- they acknowledge a world that exists apart from the physical realm. The spiritual realm plays an active part in the physical, and in acknowledging it they build stories that embrace the strangeness of these two worlds mixing.
Gohtaro wants to meet his best friend from the past, and though there is trembling mention of 'spooks' it is not so strange for them after all.

The sepia tones of the cafe, both in the present and the past, create the sense of the unreal, giving the story a rather dream-like quality. There are long moments of abject silence interrupted with sudden bursts of talk and laughter and energy that can be quite unsettling (not in a bad way).

The story itself (not counting the setting) was warm, full of forgiveness and hope, and the characters were just so...Japanese. I don't mean anything by that last comment except to say I could recognise these characters of few words and in-depth feeling from the quirky anime I have seen before.

I look forward to reading the rest of the stories, and updating this 'review'.

UPDATE: I read through this slowly -- story by story. This book was just special and nostalgic in a way. I loved these characters. They were so quiet and yet so real. 

I've got the first book in my cart right now. Looking forward to reading that one as well! It will give me a more wholesome view of the recurring characters in this book, and I look forward to re-discovering them backwards!! That should make for an interesting experience.