As he watched the steam, a strange sensation, much like dizziness, enveloped him, and everything surrounding the table began to ripple and shimmer.
Worried that another wave of sleepiness was coming on, he tried to rub his eyes.
‘Argh…’ he exclaimed unintentionally.
His hands, his body, were becoming one with the steam from the coffee. It had not been his surroundings that were rippling and shimmering; it had been him. Suddenly, his surroundings began to move so that everything above him was falling past him with amazing speed.
Experiencing all this, he screamed out, ‘Stop… stop!’
He was no good with scary rides – the mere sight of them was enough to make him swoon – but unfortunately for him, his surroundings seemed to be going past him faster and faster, as time wound back twenty-two years.
He felt increasingly giddy. When he realized that he was now returning to the past, his consciousness gradually receded.
After Shuichi and his wife died, Gohtaro ran the restaurant alone while bringing up Haruka. Even while Shuichi was still alive, multitalented and diligent Gohtaro had worked out how to manage the restaurant single-handedly, from the cooking to the accounting.
But Gohtaro, a bachelor, found that raising a small child was unimaginably difficult. Haruka had just turned one – which meant she was now taking her first tentative steps – and someone needed to be watching her all the time. She would also often cry at night, which deprived him of sleep. When she entered nursery, he thought that life would become easier, but she became anxious around strangers and hated going. Every day she would burst into tears when it was time to leave.
When she was in elementary school, she would often announce she was going to help in the restaurant but only ended up being a nuisance. It was difficult to know by the words she used exactly what she meant, and if he didn’t always listen to what she had to say she would sulk. If she got a fever, he had to take her to the doctor. And of course, children have a social calendar too, including birthdays, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and so on. On holiday, it bothered him when she asked to be taken to a funfair, or say she wanted this and that.
In junior high, she entered her rebellious phase, which only grew worse with age. Once in high school, he received a phone call from the police after she had been caught shoplifting.
Adolescent Haruka got herself into all kinds of mischief, but however tense the circumstances, Gohtaro never once wavered in his resolve to provide a happy upbringing for her, who had been left alone in this world.
It was just three months earlier that she had brought home a man called Satoshi Obi and announced they were dating with the possibility that it might lead to marriage.
On his third visit, Satoshi asked Gohtaro, ‘Please give me your blessing to marry Haruka.’
‘You have my blessing,’ he replied simply.
All he wanted was for her to be happy; he would not stand in the way of that.
After graduating from high school, Haruka became much more reasonable. She decided to go to culinary school to become a chef and that is where she met Obi. After finishing culinary school, Obi found a job in a hotel in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district and Haruka started helping at Gohtaro’s restaurant.
After Haruka’s wedding was announced, Gohtaro started to feel terrible guilt for lying to her.
For twenty-two years he had raised her, telling her that she was his real daughter. In order to hide from her the truth that she had no living blood relatives, he had never shown her the contents of the family register. But now she was to marry, everything was different. When she went to the registry office to file her marriage, she would discover that she was orphaned, revealing the lie that Gohtaro had maintained all these years.
After agonizing over it, he finally decided to tell her the truth before the wedding. Then he would say that the real father is meant to be there at the wedding ceremony.
The truth will probably hurt her, but it can’t be helped.
Although there was nothing that could be done now.
‘Ah, excuse me… Sir?’
Gohtaro awoke feeling his shoulder being shaken. A large-framed man stood in front of him. He was wearing jet-black school trousers and a dark brown apron over a white shirt with the sleeves folded to his elbows. Gohtaro recognized the giant as the cafe’s owner Nagare. But it was a much younger Nagare.
The memory of that day started emerging from the recesses of Gohtaro’s brain.
He was certain that this young version of the owner, Nagare, had been there twenty-two years ago.
The rest of the cafe, however – the slowly spinning ceiling fan, the dark brown columns and beams and tan-coloured walls and the three clocks on the wall each showing a different time – was unchanged. Even twenty-two years in the past, the cafe had its sepia hue, the result of the only light being given by the shaded lamps. If the young Nagare had not been standing before him, he would not have noticed that he had gone back.
However, the more he looked around the cafe, the faster his heart beat.
He’s not here.
If he had gone back to the right day, Shuichi should have been there, but he wasn’t.
He thought back to the various rules he had been told and realized he had never been told how to return to the right day. What’s more, his time in the past was only the short period before his coffee went cold. He might have arrived before they arrived, or they may have already left the cafe.
‘Shuichi!’ Gohtaro called and without thinking began to stand up. But before he did, he felt Nagare’s big hand on his shoulder keep him in his chair.
‘He’s in the toilet,’ he muttered.
Gohtaro was fifty-one years old and a large stocky man, but Nagare placed a hand lightly on his shoulder as if was petting the head of a child.
‘The guy you came to meet is in the toilet. He’ll come back soon, so rather than getting up like that, you’d be better off waiting.’
Gohtaro became a little calmer. According to the rules, standing up from the chair instantly took you back to the present; if not for Nagare, he would most probably be there now.
‘Ah, thank you.’
‘No problem,’ replied Nagare in rather a clinical manner, and walked away to stand behind the counter with his arms folded. Standing there, he looked less like a waiter and more like a sentry guarding a castle.
No one else was in the cafe.
But there were people in the cafe. On that day twenty-two years ago, there had been a couple sitting at the table closest to the entrance and one person at the counter.
And where Gohtaro was sitting now, in the seat that returns you to the past, there had been a near-elderly gentleman wearing a tuxedo and boasting a well-groomed moustache.
The gentleman’s look had seemed very old-fashioned. Gohtaro clearly remembered him because he had thought, That guy looks like he has time-travelled from the 1920s.
However, the three other customers had left quickly, perhaps because they could not bear Gohtaro’s filthy state or his odd stench.
Then he remembered. As soon as they had entered, Shuichi had enthusiastically declared that this was a mysterious cafe where it was possible to go back in time. Then, after listening to his account of what had happened to him, he had gone to the toilet.
Gohtaro wiped sweat from his brow with his palm and drew a deep breath in through his nose. Then, from the back room, a girl of elementary-school age appeared with a brand-new randoseru backpack.
‘Come on, Mum, hurry!’ the girl yelled as she skipped and pranced around the cafe.
‘I bet you’re happy now, huh?’ said young Nagare to the girl circling around in the centre of the cafe, his arms still folded.