This was such a moving story: poignant, profound, thoughtful, soul-wrenching. I can’t help but wonder how many of us live lives like this: short and sad and broken.
The story is an odd one. A ghost thinks back on his life, how the pieces of his life fractured. Decisions were made, as they always are, with the best intentions and the results aren’t always what we hope for.
I don’t want to give it away. You’ll just have to read it. And it’s a short read; there’s so much emotion packed into this small space. There is something performative, a sombre mimicry, about the way this story is condensed — almost truncated — much like the life it is about. The novel feels like a life lived unfinished, in staggered surges.
Like most Japanese novels, Miri’s prose is succinct; the words are few but thoughtfully placed to elicit the most emotional response.
The Nakano Thrift Shop: A Novel by Hiromi Kawakami
I saw this book at the library and the cover was so cute, I just couldn’t resist checking it out. I know, I know, I shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but who doesn’t? Really? That said, the description also hooked me: I love thrift stores and I love Japanese fiction.
The Nakano Thrift Shop did not disappoint. The novel follows in that great Japanese literary tradition of deeply intimate writing. The story was simple, but poignant; it was recognizable and human in its simplicity, in its ordinariness. The events of the novel could have happened anywhere and to anyone, and that’s what makes it so relatable and so touching. Readers will find a part of themselves here in some way.
The novel revolves — unsurprisingly — around Nakano’s thrift store, a kind of junk store that sells amazing and banal things, and its employees. A young woman, a worker at the store, is the protagonist through whose eyes we view this small world. Her interactions with Nakano, a quiet young man who is her colleague, the shop owner’s sister, customers, and others within the orbit of the shop are the focus of the novel. This novel is about capturing a short moment in time, a time and world bracketed by the opening and closing of the store; it is a slice of their interconnected lives.
The events that take place are mundane: sales, returns, fixations on objects in the shop, the comings and goings of certain customers, falling in and out of love, the opening and closing of the store. Nothing “happens” but the slightest of events change the dynamics of the shop and its denizens, revealing a new perspective. The novel reveals how thin our veneers are, and how small actions can suddenly strip away our layers. The reader is treated to that peeling away, gets to witness characters in their most human and vulnerable form. That is the brilliance and appeal of this novel.
Before Your Memory Fades: A Novel by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Before Your Memory Fades is the third installment of the Before The Coffee Gets Cold series. It picks up directly where the second novel, Tales From The Café leaves off. I thoroughly enjoyed the first novel and loved how the second one tied up loose ends; this third novel follows with the same pace, cadence, and story. For those who love the way the past and present and future intertwines and the mythology of the series, Before Your Memory Fades will feel like a warm welcome in an old and familiar place (the Cafe Funiculi Funicula, of course!)
For me, personally, Before Your Memory Fades made less of an impression on me than I expected. I think I had tired of the story; indeed, there was nothing necessarily new in this novel that the previous two had not delivered. The emotional payoff for me was spent, but this does not lessen the potential payoff of the novel for a fan of the series: There is a ghost, albeit a new one, in The Seat in the café and there are new eager patrons who come to use the time traveling device to correct some wrong they have committed in the past or have yet to commit in the future. Then there is the same terrible lesson they learn: that love and obligation are on the same sides of the coin and that they cannot change the events fated to them, but the knowledge they learn in the past or future can change their hearts and souls in their present.
We are reintroduced to familiar, new, and newish characters, Nagare and Kei’s now teenaged daughter, Miki, and a new employee, Reiji, who works at another café in the “family”, Café Donna Donna, which also has its own time-bending seat, its own ghost, and its own crew of café regulars, Nanako and Dr Saki Muraoka, There are familiar characters: Nagare and Kazu. There is also Kazu’s daughter, Sachi, who is the newest Tokita woman to wield the power of the coffee and time travel. There are new patrons who arrive at the Café Donna Donna to rewrite their pasts: a daughter who seeks out her parents and a way to manifest her vengeance, a comedic celebrity who needs to tell his wife something important, and others.
All in all, Before Your Memory Fades delivers on its promise. It is a fantastic addition to the existing two novels. It continues the tradition of the Café Funiculi Funicula, giving the reader more of what they fell in love with in the first novel.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 