What is the limit?” “Oh, take a hundred,” said the librarian triumphantly. I am in Finland, in a small town near the southern coast. I am here on a writing retreat but have been rendered hors de combat. After flying in with a pre-existing cold, I am afflicted with a nagging tinnitus. I have travelled thousands of kilometres to reach an incredibly quiet place in the woods, ideal for writing in silent contemplation, but I constantly hear a humming thump, as if I am stuck at a traffic signal in Nanakramguda. It is a bizarre premise straight out of Murakami.

Unable to write, I make my way to the local library, even though I am merely a tourist. “There is no such thing,” said the librarian when I ask about a temporary membership. “But just borrow anyway,” she said recklessly. I look around; most of the titles are in Finnish and Swedish, but there is one bookcase devoted to English literature. Most of them are classics like Woolf and Hemingway, but there is a shelf filled with Japanese “cosycore” reads. At some point after the lockdown, the books of the latter kind seem to have proliferated, with titles such as Before the Coffee Gets Cold or Days at the Morisaki Bookshop.

I find a spot in the upstairs reading room, with a view of the brilliant blue sky, divided into panels by the full length windows. I soon realise that I need to read the whole Before the Coffee gets Cold series by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, to take them home and embark on a binge-read. Which is when I ask the librarian how many I can check out at a time.

Until then, I had read Japanese literature only if the books had murders and were populated with eccentric characters ranging from Edogawa Ranpo’s baroque gold-mask-wearing villains to Seishi Yokomizo’s dandruff-afflicted detective investigating gruesome crimes in remote villages. My initial foray into the cosycore genre is filtered by the Uusimaa province’s library system and the tastes of its residents. So I do not have Asako Yuzuki’s breakout novel, Butter, but her next translated novel, Hooked. I do not have the first book of the Before the Coffee series but the second and fourth installment, and so on. As I take a deep dive, I realise that while Hooked is a different kettle of fish, all the rest conform to a template. They are usually an interconnected series of vignettes set in a magical shop or café, with some gimmick tying them together.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa has the eponymous bookshop. Before the Coffee Gets Cold has a coffee shop, with a time travel angle. Coffee is substituted with hot chocolate in Hot Chocolate on Thursday by Michiko Aoyama, another set of linked stories about the patrons of a café, which is “all about finding moments of warmth, and sweetness in the dull grey of daily existence”. There can be other retail outlets in place of cafés. Notes from the Ginza Shihodo Stationery Shop (by Kenji Ueda) has an owner who, with “quiet wisdom and careful attention… helps each visitor fulfil their stationery needs, but also to express what lies within their hearts”.

The Blanket Cats by Kiyoshi Shigematsu has “Blanket Cats—carefully trained animals who had grown up with their own special blankets. There was a shop… that rented them out to people for short stays.” These healing felines naturally form their own stories as they touch the lives of those who have borrowed them.

The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai has a father-daughter duo of detectives who are “capable of recreating a dish from their customers’ pasts that may well hold the key to forgotten memories and ongoing happiness”: the chapters are named after dishes. As I go through the blurbs, I keep anticipating the exhaustion of all possible permutations and combinations. The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park (Michiko Aoyama, again) is set in a children’s playground with, well, a healing hippo: “According to urban legend, if you touch the exact part of the hippo where you have an ailment or wound, you will see swift signs of recovery.”

The ‘healing’ genre

Returning to the bibliophile theme, The Vanishing Cherry Blossom Bookshop (Takuya Asakura) is a kind of magical pop-up that appears only during the cherry blossom season. The owner and her pet cat “wait for visitors carrying regrets and sorrows, helping them find the peace that they needed”. Dinner at the Night Library (Hika Harada) closes the circle by featuring a library with an in-house café serving “chef-prepared meals”. By the time I get to the The Amberglow Candy Store (Hiyoko Kurisu), with a candy store that appears only between the full moon and the new moon, and where “each candy cures an ailment of the heart or the mind” and the owner is half-fox, I am ready to give up. I notice that these books are usually described by similar-sounding phrases and adjectives: “entirely devoid of high-stakes”, “soothing”, “undemanding”, “life-affirming”, or “fiction that puts you in a good mood”.

Someone asked on X: “How many Japanese novels about cafés or bookstores can the current literary landscape withstand?” This profusion is actually a continuation of the Iyashikei, or the “healing” genre of manga and anime that took off in the 1990s. The Kobe earthquake, the Tokyo poison gas attacks, coupled with economic recession and societal fatigue, ensured that readers turned away from conflict-driven plots towards the fictional equivalent of a “safe space”. Or, as the academic Paul Roquet says in the paper titled “Ambient Literature and the Aesthetics of Calm: Mood Regulation in Contemporary Japanese Fiction”: “These episodes of national trauma—along with the more widespread effects of economic recession and restructuring—were often said to have provided the emotional context for the emergence of calm as a lucrative and marketable feeling.”

My readings of Japanese crime fiction have made me aware of how genres bear the imprint of their times. The locked room mysteries emerging during the bubble economy years (1986-91) in Japan featured giant mansions built by eccentric millionaires. At the height of the boom, the murders took place in decagon-shaped houses, mills with secret passages, even in a house shaped like a labyrinth. When the bubble burst and decades of prolonged economic stagnation began, murderers again reverted to despatching their victims in the more homely surroundings of middle-class 2BHKs or suburban villas.

Deterministic universe

I am soon immersed in Tales from the Cafe, the second installment in the Before the Coffee series. The basic premise is a café, called the Funiculi Funicula, tucked away in a back street, that enables time travel. The central point is that “nothing you can do while in the past... will change the present”, although most customers trying to time-travel are doing so with the wish to fix past deeds. This is cutting-edge physics. In the 1980s, the Soviet scientist Igor Novikov put forward what is now known as the Novikov self-consistency principle. It basically states that, in practical terms, it is impossible to alter the past: “[I]f an event exists that would cause a paradox or any ‘change’ to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero. It would thus be impossible to create time paradoxes” (“Grandfather paradox in time travel” by Nicolae Sfetcu).

This deterministic universe gels well with Kawaguchi’s storytelling. Every cliché comes to life: detectives wear trench coats, cute kids are always up to mischief, characters move like marionettes, almost everyone has a back story and is waiting for the cue to blurt out their secrets. The subterranean café with its grandfather clock is like a theatrical set, which is not a surprise given that Kawaguchi is a playwright and the novel is an adaptation of his stage play. 

Tales from the Café was brought out by a Japanese publisher better known for self-help books and has been labelled as “a type of book that sells by reaching an audience that doesn’t usually read novels”. Despite the schmaltzy premise, I find it hard to resist the flow. In our present state, why should readers not long to retreat to a better, safer world? Is it not what the magic of reading is all about?

***

Hooked, however, is far away from healing. It foregrounds the tangled dynamics between Eriko, a successful professional who wants not so much to have friends as to be seen as a person who has friends, and Shoko, a stay-at-home wife. Shoko documents her slacking lifestyle in her popular blog, and this is what draws Eriko to her. Yuzuki’s standout touch is her mastery of the interior monologue technique as she takes a cauterising look at contemporary Japanese attitudes towards women and the expectations centred around them.

At one point, after Eriko’s obsession crosses the line into stalking, Shoko tells her: “We’re both victims here. We’re strays who’ve fallen from the intricate net of rules ensnaring Japanese women.” Shoko herself is addicted to her blog, “leaving her incapable of being present in the rest of her life. Whatever she laid eyes on, she could only think about it in terms of a potential blog post.” Eriko’s job is to source fish from Africa and resell it to cheap fast food outlets under misleading labels. The sense that the natural order is suspended and everything is artifice permeates the narrative, making it a deeply disturbing read, the opposite of the kind that provides “portable affective calm”.

The surprise for me is The Blanket Cats. The acutely observed slices of middle-class life with typical Japanese interpersonal issues—“She couldn’t forgive her neighbor Mrs. Midorikawa for the way she secretly mixed her recycling in with her regular garbage”—and the theme of magical cats somehow work. In one of the chapters, an ageing, childless couple look to adopt a cat because “once the sadness arrived, it never went away. But it wasn’t sadness for their present situation that enveloped them, so much as a realization that the quiet life they shared was simply going to roll onward indefinitely into the future.”

Bleary-eyed, I bring my binge-reading to an end. At this time of the year, there is no proper night in Finland. It is permanently bright, the days suffused with endless light, which plays havoc with my body clock. After this diet of quiet bookshops, ramen noodles, and calico cats, I say with a character in The Blanket Cats: “I’ve become more sensitive… more vulnerable, maybe… yes—it’s like my emotional immune system’s gotten all weak.”

Jaideep Unudurti is a freelance journalist and graphic novelist.

Also Read | Alone with silence in Kökar

Also Read | Monster in the machine: Will AI art make the human artist irrelevant?