Publisher: Harper Perennial/Bonnier Books UK | Manilla Press
Publication Date: September 2025
On the heels of the success of Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and its sequel, More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, we have another foray from Satoshi Yagisawa into a cafe this time. Days at the Torunka Café begins quietly, like many Japanese novels of its kind, in an unassuming café tucked away down an alley. The narrator, Shuichi, spends a slow day alongside the café’s owner, and his daughter Shizuku, ruminating on the lack of customers as he listlessly mops the floor. Cats, Shuichi notes, are a common sight: “the front of the café was a thoroughfare for the cats in the neighbourhood.” From the very start, Yagisawa draws in the reader to the rhythm of the three stories to come: ordinary observations, small rituals, and feline wanderings that feel like omens.
The Torunka Café might be modest, with only five tables and a counter, but it emanates aura of a place larger than life. Shuichi recalls how he first stumbled upon it during a stroll with Megumi, his then-girlfriend, when a stray cat led them to the café, which, for all its hidden location, was “surprisingly crowded for a place that was so hard to find.” The detail is charming, but telling, of the way Yagisawa treats coincidence and memory, not as accidents but as quiet structures guiding the characters’ lives.
After their break-up, Shuichi reflects with painful clarity:
“The old cliché might really be true: It’s only after you lose something that you realize how precious it was. I learned it after I lost Megumi. I wish I could’ve spent my whole life without learning that lesson.”
It’s a line that crystallises Yagisawa’s preoccupation with impermanence, with how loss, whether of people, places, or rituals, gives ordinary moments their weight.
Food and drink become one of the novel’s languages of intimacy and learning. Shuichi begins making coffee at home after starting his job at Torunka:
Starting my part-time job at the café inspired me to create my own setup at home with an electric grinder and a drip bag to make coffee for myself. At first I didn’t really taste the difference, to be honest, but as the owner taught me the basics, I gradually came to see what separated a properly made cup of coffee from everything else. According to the owner, the type of beans you choose and the quality of your equipment both determine the quality of the coffee, but the secret to making good coffee comes down to “taking the time to do it right.” Simply paying careful attention to the timing of when I removed the filter from the carafe made a marked improvement in the flavor of the coffee. As soon as I became aware of the differences in flavor, I was amazed to compare the owner’s coffee with what I made at home. Even with the same type of coffee beans, the aftertaste was totally different. Once I realized that, the coffee I made improved considerably. It’s not like I’m planning on opening my own café in the future, but there’s nothing better than a delicious cup of coffee.
As the narrative widens, Chinatsu enters the frame. Chinatsu claims that Shuichi and her were lovers from a previous life. At first, Shuichi finds this strange, even unsettling, but he cannot quite dismiss her.
Gradually, Chinatsu and Shuichi grow closer, learning more about each other. On Valentine’s Day, Chinatsu offers Shuichi chocolates, and on White Day, he resolves to ask her out. Yet her response is fraught: she insists she had pressured him into it, then admits her story of a past life was partly fabricated. In truth, they had met before, but in the same life, in their childhood. She is painfully aware that her fumbled explanation only made her seem odd.
For Shuichi, the revelation is less a rupture than a strange solace. Though he cannot clearly remember their childhood, he is moved by her persistence:
“It warmed my heart to think there was someone out there who cherished their memories of me, and that it wasn’t creepy, it was heartwarming.”
Yagisawa excels at gentle pivots, where minor incidents accrue emotional depth. Like Before the Coffee Gets Cold or What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, Days at the Torunka Café is less about dramatic transformation than about quiet recognitions.
If Shuichi’s story is about tentative beginnings, the second tale at Torunka is marked by hindsight and regret. It belongs to Hiro, a man in his fifties who returns to the café after decades away. Once “young, reckless, and very ambitious,” Hiro recalls how he had fallen for Saene, a woman he first met at the dry cleaners. Their love blossomed quickly, with Nomura Coffee (Torunka’s former identity) woven into the rhythm of their life together. But as his business ambitions grew, what once felt like shelter—Saene’s small apartment, her meals, her quiet devotion—began to seem shabby. He broke things off under the pretence that she deserved someone less consumed by work, only to marry later into wealth and entrap himself in a loveless, transactional marriage.
Now, sitting in Torunka, Hiro catalogues his mistakes. He even rails against coffee as “the devil’s drink,” an ironic counterpoint in a novel where coffee usually offers comfort. Then he strikes up an odd friendship with Ayako, one of Torunka’s regulars, also revealed to be Saene’s daughter. The café becomes more than a backdrop. It is a place where past and present collide, and where memory refuses to stay buried.
“In life, reunions are the closest thing we get to miracles.”
If Hiro’s tale bends toward regret, the third and final perspective of Shizuku, the café owner’s daughter, whose presence has always hovered lightly in the background of the earlier chapters, is the perfect closure of this loop.
Coffee is a strong presence, as regales people in the tale of how her name came to be because of coffee. She recalls taking a few illicit sips as a child, only to suffer a dizzying caffeine rush, “whether it was because of the power of suggestion or the actual effects of caffeine, right as we were talking about it, I started to feel my head spin like it was locked inside a washing machine.” That memory, told years later to Chinatsu, is at once comic and poignant, situating her life in the same pattern of anecdotes, rituals, and chance encounters that define Torunka’s atmosphere.
We also see Shizuku, now a teenager, grappling with larger questions of love and disillusionment. After a chance encounter with her sister’s ex-boyfriend, she muses sceptically about romance. While everyone else assumes her bond with her close friend Kota hints at something more, Shizuku resists. Her youthful philosophising sits oddly against her age, but it offers a poignant mirror to Shuichi’s guarded heart and Hiro’s regrets.
Throughout these stories, there are recurring characters at the cafe. Ayako, the woman central to Hiro’s story and a young regular in the café, peppers her conversations with literary quotations. In translation, these are rendered with a patchwork of recognisable sources—English-language stand-ins for Japanese originals. It is both awkward and endearing, a reminder of the compromises and improvisations embedded in the act of translation itself.
Which brings me to a broader point: as with many contemporary Japanese “cosy” novels, the English prose occasionally stumbles. Japanese, with its elliptical, high-context cadences, is notoriously difficult to carry over into English, and in Days at the Torunka Café, that difficulty sometimes shows. Dialogue can feel stilted, even unnatural, and yet the texture of the world: the quiet alleys, the warm rituals, the philosophising teenagers and regretful elders, come to life. As a reader, you learn to look past the clunkiness, because the setting itself continues to nourish.
By the end, what Yagisawa has given us is not just three stories, but three distillations of what it means to linger in memory: the tentative hope of Shuichi and Chinatsu, the regret-laden reckoning of Hiro and Saene, and the thoughtful coming-of-age of Shizuku. Each strand, like a drop of coffee, carries its own concentrated flavour.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the advanced review copy.
