The Saveur coffee shop is a three-minute walk from the Morisaki Bookshop. Everyone in the neighborhood knows the Saveur, as you might expect of a place that’s been around for fifty years. In the old days, many of the great writers who lived in Jimbocho often spent time there.
The stone-walled interior is dimly lit by lamplight alone, and it’s filled with the rich aroma of coffee. The effect is quite soothing. Though it’s normally bustling with customers, it never feels noisy. In fact, the sound of chatter blends in with the understated piano music playing in the background, and the result is somehow even more pleasant. Since my uncle brought me here that summer three years ago, I’ve loved the place’s atmosphere and the taste of its coffee. I’m still a regular customer.
The owner of the coffee shop is an elegant man in his midforties with a long, slender face. At first glance, he might seem intimidating, but he’s actually quite friendly and easy to talk to. When he smiles, he gets sweet-looking wrinkles around his eyes. As soon as I open the door, he calls out “Welcome!” from behind the counter where he’s brewing coffee.
Tonight was no different. As soon as I opened the door, he greeted me warmly, just like he always did. “Hey, Takako. Welcome!”
“Good evening. Seems busy again today.” I looked around the store as I said hello.
“Thank you. We’re heading into the busy season for the coffee shop. It’s when we make more money,” the owner said as he polished a glass. He flashed a slightly mischievous smile.
“I guess when it gets colder, people crave coffee.”
“So it goes.”
Actually, it didn’t matter if it was spring or summer; this coffee shop always seemed to be bustling. Still, there was a particular pleasure in drinking a good cup of coffee during the colder times of the year. I supposed the other customers must have felt the same way.
“So, are you meeting someone?”
“I am.”
“Oh, how nice. Well, enjoy.”
I smiled and bowed slightly.
The waitress came over right away, as if she’d been waiting for me, and led me to a seat by the window that had just opened up. As a matter of fact, this coffee shop was also the place where my boyfriend, Wada, and I would arrange to meet. His office was nearby, so it was a perfect spot. Whenever he was working late, I would pass the time by reading a book and having a cup of coffee. As usual, I had tucked a favorite book into my bag tonight. I took it out right away and started to read. The time I spend this way is quiet, but also exciting—waiting for the person I love to arrive. It somehow feels incredibly luxurious to sit in your favorite coffee shop, reading a book, waiting for your boyfriend.
I had read for about a half hour, waiting this way, when I heard the sound of someone tapping on the windowpane. Wada was standing outside the window. Our eyes met, and he waved. When I waved back, he turned and headed to the entrance.
“Sorry to keep you waiting.” He sat down across from me, a bit out of breath, as if he’d come in a hurry. There was no dress code at his work, so he was dressed casually today as usual. For the most part, Wada’s clothes followed the same set pattern: a jacket with slim-fitting pants or slacks. If you asked him, he’d tell you it was because it was “too much of a hassle to pick what to wear,” but that chic style was really what looked best on him. Today, he was wearing a stylish black jacket with gray slacks that fit him perfectly.
“I just got here,” I said with a smile as I shut my book.
“Oh, I hope so.” Wada looked at me for a long time with a smile on his face. He just stared at me without saying anything. He kept staring at me for so long that I started to feel embarrassed, then I realized his attention was actually directed at the book in my hand.
“Is that a collection by Taruho Inagaki?” Wada asked with a tinge of admiration in his voice.
“Oh, um, well, yeah . . .” I said, struggling a bit to figure out why these were the first words out of his mouth after we hadn’t seen each other in a week. Wada, however, didn’t seem to notice my reaction at all.
“One Thousand and One-Second Stories is pretty good, isn’t it?” he said.
“It is.” Wada seemed so happy that I quickly regained my composure and agreed with him. “They’re perfect to read in a place like this. They’re short and kind of cute. And it seems like they’d go well somehow with a cup of coffee.”
“You’re right. Absolutely,” Wada said enthusiastically. “For starters, even the titles are funny. ‘How I Lost Myself’ or ‘How My Friend Turned into the Moon.’”
“They’re so funny. I mean that’s why I’ve read this book five times now.”
Wada was a proper book lover too. He had a particular weakness for old Japanese novels. He was far more knowledgeable than I was, since I had only just begun to read seriously. And like most people who love to read he seemed interested in what other people were reading too. He was always curious about each and every book I read. Whenever it was something he loved, he would start smiling like this, and when it was a book he hated or hadn’t read yet, he would grimace like a child in the cafeteria being served a dish they hated. The look on his face was so earnest that I would end up feeling embarrassed, as if I were guilty of some awful betrayal. To be honest though, I sometimes looked forward a little to seeing that look on his face. On this particular day, my book seemed to be a hit, and I didn’t get to see Wada’s sad grimace.
“That reminds me, the first day we met here, you were reading Taruho Inagaki.”
“Wait, is that right? I remember I was reading a book.”
“No doubt about it. I remember that day vividly.”
Hearing Wada tell me that so emphatically made me feel embarrassed somehow. I tried to hide it by laughing.
My relationship with Wada started when we ran into each other here at the Saveur one night and ended up having coffee together. I knew him by sight because he was a customer at the bookshop, but this was the first time we had really talked. Looking back, I think that’s when I first felt attracted to him. We’ve been close since then, but we didn’t officially decide we were a couple until sometime before the summer. So, at this point we’d been going out for only a matter of months.
I’ve tried to call him Akira, which is his actual first name, but even now I still find myself calling him by his last name, Wada, the name I’ve been using from the first time we met.
It’s thanks to the owner of the Saveur that things turned out this way. Which is why I still feel indebted to him.
Wada is an exceptionally courteous person. He hates to be in the spotlight any more than is necessary. In crowded places, for example, he tends to withdraw to the background, listening quietly to everyone talk with a smile on his face, throwing out a clever comment from time to time. That’s the kind of person he is. But there’s also something quirky about him. Suddenly his stubborn side will emerge, and he’ll declare, “Today I want to eat calamari. I decided this morning, and my decision is firm. I won’t let anything else into my stomach.” He could be a difficult guy to read. But I adored the way he was a little bit weird.
We had different days off from work, and Wada’s job got busy at the end of each month, when it was common for him to work on his regular days off. So, we could often only meet for a period of time like this in the evenings. Our mismatched work schedule was proving to be a substantial stumbling block in our relationship. We were both the kind of people who take their job seriously. There was no way for either of us to just cut out early and call it a day. So, the time we were able to spend together was, by necessity, limited. While I couldn’t help being frustrated by this, I also knew that there was really nothing I could do about it.
At any rate, this was our first time seeing each other in a week. We were having a cup of coffee and talking about going to get something to eat soon when Takano made a rare appearance outside the kitchen.
Takano was the kitchen manager at the Saveur. He was a tall and gangly young man who had such a timid way of speaking that he came off as completely helpless. I’d heard that he wanted to open his own coffee shop one day and was being trained here by the owner.
“Nice to see you, Takano. It’s been a while.”
“Good to see you too, Takako, and, er . . . um, you as well, Wada.”
Takano tended to be pretty shy around strangers, and it seemed that he was only slightly familiar with Wada and still not used to speaking to him.
“Good evening. It’s Takano, right?” Wada replied with a warm smile. I could see from the look on Takano’s face that this put him at ease too. Wada had a knack for this. He could talk to anyone easily and make them feel comfortable.
Yet even after we finished greeting one another, Takano continued to hang around for some reason, lingering nearby like a hyena eyeing a lion’s leftovers. It was getting a little weird, so I asked him what was going on.
“Ah, no, it’s okay. We can talk next time.”
Just as he was mumbling his response, the owner called, “Hey, Takano!” from the other side, his voice radiating anger.
As soon as Takano heard him, he panicked and rushed back to the kitchen.
“What was that about?” I was left shaking my head as I watched Takano’s spindly frame abruptly disappear into the back.
Wada looked equally confused. “He did seem to be acting kind of suspiciously.”
“Still, acting suspiciously is hardly a new thing for him.”
“In that case, I guess there’s nothing to worry about.”
After saying these rather rude things about Takano, we managed to convince ourselves, and left the Saveur.
We sauntered into the Sanseidō bookstore at closing time, then after we’d finished our meal at a nearby set-menu restaurant that Wada liked, we went on a little walk around the neighborhood. We both had to work the next day. I had an early meeting in the morning, so we decided we’d both go home afterward. Wada walked me to the station.
Wada’s apartment building was located about a fifteen-minute walk from the neighborhood of used bookshops. I’d only been there a few times, but the first time I went it gave me quite a shock. “My apartment’s a mess,” Wada tried to warn me repeatedly on our way there, and it truly was.
The moment I first set foot inside the door, I saw the leftover bento containers from the convenience store and discarded clothes scattered all over the floor. His substantial number of books were not only stored on the bookshelves, but had been left all over the sofa and the table. The kitchen area was even more disastrous. The sink was overflowing with dirty plates and frying pans. It was an appalling sight. While it would be an exaggeration to say there was nowhere to step inside, at the very least there was nowhere to sit. The closet door had been left half open, and there were huge cardboard boxes piled on top of each other inside. I peeked in the boxes, with his permission, and found lots of secondhand books. It looked like there might be some valuable ones there, but they’d been thrown in so haphazardly that it looked like it would be an ordeal just to get them organized. In any case, given how disorganized they were, it probably would have been better to have the Morisaki Bookshop pack it up and take the whole pile away.
“I’m really sorry. I’d planned to clean up, but this week has been so busy at work, I just didn’t have time.”
I’d been anxious about coming to his place, but my anxiety vanished once I saw what it looked like. I was laughing about it to myself for a long while. I felt like I’d seen an unexpected side of him, but it was so unexpected I didn’t know what to make of it.
“Well, I guess this is just what single guys’ apartments look like,” I said.
Wada, who had been panicking, now seemed to relax a bit. I’d been surprised because it was Wada’s apartment, but this level of disorder is pretty common in general. Of course, it would be nice if he’d cleaned it for the first time his girlfriend came over, but . . .
“What did you do when your last girlfriend came over?” I asked nonchalantly.
“Ah, well, she always cleaned up for me whenever she noticed. She was the kind of person who liked things to be clean,” Wada said, smiling grimly.
I suddenly regretted asking the question. You ask too many questions, I said to myself.
Wada had brought that woman several times to the Morisaki Bookshop back then. She had beautiful features and a tall, slender figure. At the time, I only knew them by sight, so I would casually look at them and think, “Oh, what a beautiful couple.” Now that the situation had changed, I wanted to take that image and stick it in the cardboard box in the closet along with all the books. Burning with petty jealousy, I decided at that moment that I would clean his apartment. I wouldn’t let that woman beat me. So, that afternoon, while Wada stood by unsure what to do with himself, I transformed into one hell of a cleaning machine.
That was how I ended up spending the night at Wada’s place.
In Wada’s arms, I became aware of something within the core of my being. And it felt like that core was being touched. It was probably the first time in my life that I’d ever felt that way.
At the same time, I worried whether Wada could really be enjoying himself with an ordinary person like me. In Jimbocho, I had met so many truly fascinating people, starting with my uncle, (even Sabu, I had to admit, was fascinating in his own way), but the flip side of that was that it made me realize just how dull and ignorant I was. Which left me worrying that Wada would soon realize it too.
I wanted to spend more time with him, to share all kinds of things together. But I wasn’t sure if Wada felt the same way. I’m terrible at romance, forever a late bloomer. That might be to blame for my last relationship, which came to a terrible end. It turned out I was the only person who had thought we were going out to begin with. Now, I was 100 percent certain that Wada wasn’t that kind of guy, but I still couldn’t tell how much he needed me.
Wada wasn’t the type to show his emotions. So I sometimes became extremely worried trying to figure out what he was thinking. What was he looking for in a girlfriend? Did he love me more than he’d loved his previous girlfriend? It’s not like I was as beautiful as she was. These thoughts weren’t getting me anywhere; they just kept going around and around in my head. But one thing was quite clear. I knew what I felt, and I wanted to express it to him in my own words. And what I definitely didn’t want to do was just muddle my way through that feeling or the relationship I’d begun with him.
Reading had started to affect me in ways I hadn’t expected. I had been touched by the kinds of love I read about in books, and that had strengthened my belief that I needed to take my own affections more seriously.
“It gets so much colder at night.”
“Yeah.”
We were slowly walking up the slight hill that leads to Ochanomizu Station. Jimbocho Station is much closer, but we had purposely gone the long way. Unlike the neighborhood of bookshops where everyone goes to bed early, this side of the street was still lit up with its many restaurants and shops selling musical instruments. There were many walking down the street and a constant stream of cars.
I wanted to stay with him.
But I had to go home.
In my head, the same thoughts kept coming back over and over.
I was watching Wada out of the corner of my eye as he walked beside me. Wada took each step so smoothly, without any wasted movement. His footsteps hardly made a sound. It was just like him. Was he feeling a little sad too? The expression on his face looked the same as always.
As we continued our walk, we had a conversation about the right book to read before going to sleep. Wada surprised me by saying he couldn’t sleep if he read in bed. He told me with a straight face that if you had to read something, then the phone book would do. After a long deliberation, I suggested Kōtarō Takamura’s book, The Chieko Poems.
“Though I think it would be a waste of a great book because you can’t actually read that much before you go to bed.”
“Somehow neither of us can come up with a proper answer,” Wada said with a smile. “But I see that The Chieko Poems is a really important book for you.”
“I mean I don’t know of another book that’s so filled with love.”
“I agree. Chieko’s mental illness only strengthened his love for her, and as if in response, his poems became more beautiful.”
An excerpt from The Chieko Poems was included in my textbooks in school, so of course I was familiar with it. But once I started to read the book from the beginning, I was surprised by how moving it was. The days Takamura spent with Chieko, all the happiness, worry, sadness, and pain of their love, all the emotions, from their first meeting to their wedding, the outbreak of her illness, and her death, were turned into lines of poetry. There’s a light within those poems that shines so brightly it’s almost blinding.
I think that probably for a lot of people, a great many actually, The Chieko Poems is an important, even irreplaceable book. And I am certainly one of those people. Whenever I read it, I’m overcome with emotion. So much so that I no longer feel the need to put it in words.
That’s why I only allow myself to read the book when I’m really compelled to. Because I want to hold on to the part of me that finds reading this book so moving. Whenever I read it, I always end up crying. No matter how many times I reread it, the tears always well up. I get tears in my eyes, just thinking about the book.
I think about how wonderful it must be to be able to put one’s thoughts into words like that.
As the thought crossed my mind, I realized the station was already in view. It was time to say goodbye.
We said good night and went our separate ways. This was the most painful moment in the day for me. Try as I might, I can’t find another word to describe it.
I stood for a moment in front of the turnstiles and watched Wada gradually recede into the distance. I thought that I might read a little bit of The Chieko Poems before bed. It had been a while. I thought about it all the way home.