Toshikazu Kawaguchi - Tales from the Café

Kurata smiled happily. He was not faking it. He looked genuinely pleased. Miki, who was sitting opposite Kurata resting her cheek on her hand, had been listening to the exchange.

‘Why did Fumiko change her name?’ she asked Nagare.

‘You change your name when you get married,’ Nagare said, sounding a little irritated, like a parent who is bombarded with similar questions every day.

‘What? Me as well? When I get married, will I change my name too?’

‘If you get married.’

‘Huh? No way. Hey, Mistress, will you change your name?’ She looked at Kazu.

Recently, Miki had started calling Kazu ‘Mistress’. No one exactly knew why. Several days earlier, it had been ‘Sister Kazu’; before that, ‘Sister’, and before that, simply ‘Kazu’. It was as if Kazu’s rank had been slowly and steadily rising.

‘Mistress, are you going to change your name if you get married?’

‘If I get married.’ Responding to Miki in her usual cool way, she carried on wiping glasses.

‘Oh… I see,’ Miki replied.

It was unclear what Miki ‘saw’, but she nodded and returned to the seat at the counter to start writing some more wishes for the tanzaku .

Beep-boop beep-boop… Beep-boop beep-boop…

The phone began ringing from the back room. Kazu was about to go and answer it, but Nagare put his hand up to stop her and disappeared into the back room himself.

Beep-boop…

Kurata dropped his eyes to the tabletop and stared at what he had written on his tanzaku.

Despite being two years his junior, Asami Mori never spoke to him in the kind of polite language normally used with more senior employees, because they joined the company at the same time. As a person full of smiles who appeared to be completely genuine, she was popular, including within the company.

Fumiko, who worked in the same office as Asami, was popular for her looks, but at work she was called a bitch behind her back. That made Asami’s presence there all the more welcome as she helped soften the war-room atmosphere that would hang in the office when a deadline approached.

Kurata and Asami would often go out drinking with people who had joined at the same time. Conversations would often centre around work grievances, but Kurata never once bad-mouthed the company or his superiors. On the contrary, he always looked on the bright side, and he showed leadership when the going got tough and the situation hopeless.

Asami saw Kurata as an extremely positive guy, but she had a boyfriend when she joined the company and never really thought of him as a ‘man’.

Kurata and Asami grew close, however, when Asami discussed her miscarriage with him. She had miscarried a child just after she had broken up with her boyfriend. She hadn’t known that she was pregnant until after the split, and the miscarriage was unrelated to the shock of breaking up. Asami had a condition which meant she was more likely to suffer a miscarriage.

When she found out that she was pregnant, she had decided to keep the baby, even if it meant being a single mum. Having made this choice, the news that she was more prone to miscarriage came as an even bigger shock. She couldn’t help but feel that it was her fault.

Overwhelmed by guilt, she shared her feelings with her close friends outside work, her parents, and her sister. Although they tried to console and comfort her in her time of sadness, none of them could offer words that dispelled the clouds from her heart.

It was while she was in this state that Kurata came up to her and asked, ‘Is something wrong?’

She didn’t think that he would understand the delicate subject of losing a baby, being a man and all. But she desperately needed a sympathetic ear – it did not matter whose it was. Of the people she had already told, her female friends had cried with her, and her parents had tried to reassure her by telling her it wasn’t her fault. She therefore assumed that Kurata, likewise, would empathize and tell her something to console her. So, she spoke honestly of her feelings.

However, after he listened to her story, his first response was to ask how many days she had carried the baby. After she told him ten weeks, or about seventy days, he asked, ‘Why do you think the child you were carrying was granted life in this world for those seventy days?’

This sparked so much anger in Asami, her lips began to tremble.

‘Are you really asking why it was given life?’ Her eyes flushed red, she sobbed convulsively. ‘Are you telling me I’m a bad person?’

She found herself unable to stop herself from snapping at him like this. She had already blamed herself for her child never having been born. But to then be told this by someone who had absolutely no businesses in saying such a thing made her even more distraught.

Kurata seemed to understand what she meant and smiled kindly. ‘No, you’ve got it wrong.’

‘What have I got wrong? The child I was carrying could do nothing! I couldn’t even let it be born! It was my fault! I was only able to give that child seventy days of life! Only seventy days!’

With a composed expression, he calmly waited for her to stop crying, and then said, ‘That child used its seventy-day-long life for your happiness.’

He spoke gently, but with unwavering certainty.

‘If you remain devastated like this, then your child will have used those seventy days in vain.’

His message was not one of empathy. He was pointing out a way Asami could change the way she thought about the grief that she was experiencing.

‘But if you try to find happiness after this, then this child will have put those seventy days towards making you happy. In that case, its life has meaning. You are the one who is able to create meaning for why that child was granted life. Therefore, you absolutely must try to be happy. The one person who would want that for you the most is that child.’

On hearing these words, Asami gasped. The deep despair that had been weighing on her heart began to shift, and everything before her appeared a little brighter.

By trying to be happy, I can give meaning to this child’s life.

That was the clear answer.

She was unable to hold back tears. She looked up to the heavens and wailed loudly as she sobbed. Her tears were less from sadness than from joy at seeing a way out from the bottomless pit and experiencing something like happiness again.

That was the moment that Kurata became more than just a very positive guy.

‘Mr Kurata?’

Kurata suddenly noticed that Nagare was standing next to him with the phone in his hand.

‘Huh, yes?’

‘It’s Fumiko.’

‘Oh… thank you.’

He took the handset. ‘Yes, it’s Kurata here.’

Kurata had said if he didn’t meet her, he would be fine with that. Nevertheless, his expression hardened a little, as if he was nervous to speak to her on the phone.

‘Uh-huh, yes… Oh, really?… I see… No, not at all… Thank you so much.’

Based only on witnessing his side of the call, he didn’t seem particularly let down. As he spoke, he sat up with his chest puffed out awkwardly and looked straight ahead, as if Fumiko was sitting there in front of him. Nagare stood observing his unnaturally tense pose with a look of concern.

‘No, no. You have done so much for me… That’s quite OK… thank you very much.’

He bowed his head very deeply.

‘Right… yes… OK, uh-huh… the coffee will be cold soon, so… yes…’

He glanced at the clock on the wall in the middle.