In an alley, located in a large city full of people, a tiny shop is open for business. This shop specializes in books, tea, coffee, stationery, pastries or maybe all of these. A cat sits in front of the shop, patiently beckoning you to come in.
From this fairly basic skeleton comes an entire genre of recent fiction. Easygoing but not entirely without conflict, hopeful but not exactly happy, cozy Japanese fiction focuses on giving the protagonists of the stories the means to solve their problems. Rather than tying plots in convenient endings, these books linger in possible, rather than certain, outcomes. These novels have proven wildly popular internationally; they currently trend as the most popular novels in translation in the English speaking world. The IU East Campus Library has some of these increasingly popular books, and many more can be procured via Interlibrary Loan.
In Mai Mochizuki’s delightful The Full Moon Coffee Shop, the characters, who live or work in Kyoto in high-pressure creative occupations, are invited on the full moon to visit a coffee shop. The shop is operated by anthropomorphic cats skilled in astrology, giving readings and specialized food and drinks to each of their guests. These readings provide the characters to realign themselves with their life’s purposes. While none of the characters receives an unambiguously positive ending, they come away from the shop with the ability to face their situations with clarity and courage.
Besides having possibly the single best cover of any book at IU East, The Cat Who Saved Books is a fascinating read. It tells the story of Rintaro, a teenage boy who inherits his grandfather’s bookstore. A talking cat sends the boy on numerous adventures to save books from those who will not read them, or who will destroy them for various reasons. While this constitutes most of the book’s plot, it is a joyous read, with Rintaro overcoming shyness and the whims of his surviving family members.
While the Tales from the Café series does not directly involve cats, this beloved series plays with notions of time and coffee, much like other cozy Japanese novels. The series focuses on Café Funiculi Funicula, a café where a cup of coffee can send the drinker on a trip to the past. Each of the books in the series includes four short stories of customers trying to resolve their pasts by revisiting them. The trip lasts “before the coffee gets cold” – that is, a short voyage that eventually sends the drinker back to the present.
Two of the main elements that appear in these works, cats and coffee, act as interlocutors to different states of thinking or being. In an exquisite essay on coffee and Japan, author Tino Cao discusses the relationship of coffee to another Japanese author, Haruki Murakami. Here, coffee is a gift to the senses, prepared by another person’s hand as a gesture of goodwill and camaraderie. It is rarely an experience of drinking or energizing, but a substance to be cherished. It should come as little surprise that coffee functions in a near-magical fashion in most of these novels, and that Murakami’s work also lingers in liminal states of imagination and reality. Cats also transcend traditional barriers of space, acting as efficient critics of human society, a tradition dating back to the early 20th century with Natsume Soseki’s classic I Am a Cat. Cats may be considered aloof and secretive in many cultures, but in Japan, one guards the tomb of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first Edo Period shogun.
Interested in Japanese culture and literature? Want to learn more about cats, books or coffee? Curious about magical realism as a genre? Ask us! iueref@iu.edu.