From the internationally bestselling author of the Morisaki Bookshop novels comes a charming and poignant story set at a quiet Tokyo café where customers find unexpected connection and experience everyday miracles.
Tucked away on a narrow side street in Tokyo is the Torunka Café, a neighborhood nook where the passersby are as likely to be local cats as tourists. Its regulars include Chinatsu Yukimura, a mysterious young woman who always leaves behind a napkin folded into the shape of a ballerina; Hiroyuki Yumata, a middle-aged man who’s returned to the neighborhood searching for the happy life he once gave up; and Shizuku, the café owner’s teenage daughter, who is still coming to terms with her sister’s death as she falls in love for the first time.
While Café Torunka serves up a perfect cup of coffee, it provides these sundry souls with nourishment far more lasting. Satoshi Yagisawa brilliantly illuminates the periods in our lives where we feel lost—and how we find our way again.

My Review:

I picked this up, and started it in audio, because I adored the author’s two books featuring the Morisaki Bookshop (Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop) and was looking forward to more of the same.

But the Morisaki Bookshop turned out to have some secret sauce that the Torunka Café, at least so far, doesn’t have. That’s in spite of the tantalizingly delicious descriptions of the coffee the café serves.

Then again, and in sympathy with the café owner’s daughter Shizuko, I don’t like the taste of coffee. Shizuko’s introduction to the bitterness of coffee was at age seven – and it was clearly a bit of a shock to her system. Mine, on the other hand, was sweetened a bit too much when my parents dropped a spoonful of black coffee into my entire glass of milk. Both of us were left with misplaced expectations about the experience that we never got over.

Shizuko, however, gets reminded of that early experience on the regular. Her dad, the café’s owner, literally named her ‘drop’ or ‘droplet’, because he wanted her life to be as rich and as satisfying as the concentrated flavor in every drop of a well-prepared cup of coffee.

Like many similar books, including Monday’s Menu of Happiness, Days at the Torunka Café isn’t one story so much as it is three stories linked by the titular location. And that’s where I got disappointed – or suffered from those misplaced expectations.

Part of what I love about the Kamogawa Food Detectives series is that the framing story about the Kamogawa Diner and the relationship between chef Nagare Kamogawa and his adult daughter Koishi is as strong and important a story as the individual stories of their clients.

In those Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, while there are stories about people in the neighborhood who frequent the shop, the story as a whole centers on Takako, her eccentric uncle Satoru, and the bookstore that gives her a place to land and recover after a terrible break up. The bookstore is a central location, and it’s certainly her shelter against life’s storms when she needs one, but it’s HER story more than anyone else’s and it just worked better for this reader.

That she’s sheltering in a bookstore and recovering her equilibrium by getting lost in the world of books probably helped me get into both the book and her story, but I think I mostly enjoyed that the story had a central figure. Which is the same thing that put The Ex-Boyfriend’s Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee over the top for me as well, that the gang at that café carries the story.

Escape Rating C: So this one didn’t quite work for this reader – or listener. One of the other reasons that it didn’t is that, unlike the Morisaki Bookshop stories where there is one central character and therefore the audio works with one single narrator, those Days at the Torunka Café are made up of three very distinct stories linked by a location, and it needed distinct narrators for each story the way that What You Are Looking For Is In the Library did. The narrator of Torunka Café, Sadao Udea (or Ueda, I’m seeing both spellings), was a good choice for either the first story (a young man in his early 20s) OR the second (a middle-aged man in his early 50s) but not both (mostly because the listener’s ear expects Shūichi but gets Hiro, an entirely different person, in the second story) and not the third, which is from the first person perspective of Shizuku, the café owner’s high school aged daughter.

(It’s not that men can’t voice women and vice versa, but these stories are told in the first-person which, from the perspective of this listener, begs for a closer match between the narrator and the character than a third-person viewpoint. Your listening mileage may vary.)

So I came into this book with high hopes, BUT it didn’t quite work for me on multiple levels. I expected more ‘through story’ than this book is intended to have. Personally, I had a difficult time getting into the first story, “Sunday Ballerinas” because I didn’t care for the characters. The protagonist Shūichi is too much of a doormat and in that first story Shizuku comes off as a bit of a bully. That Shizuku is the protagonist of the third story, “A Drop of Love”, while she’s more sympathetic from inside her own head, well, I had already formed an opinion that was hard to shake. The second story, “The Place Where We Meet Again”, had just the type of ‘sad fluff’ vibes I was expecting, but it wasn’t enough to carry the whole book.

There is a second book in this series, and I’m sure I’ll pick it up when the translation is published, just to see how things are going at the Torunka Café.