41 pages 1 hour read

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Tales From the Cafe

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter 4

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4 Summary: “Husband and Wife”

Kazu is pregnant, and Nagare tells her that he thinks she should keep the baby. They are immediately interrupted when the detective, Kiyoshi, returns to the café. He says he needs to go to the past to give his wife the necklace Kazu helped him pick out for her. Nagare asks why Kiyoshi needs to return to the past to do so.

To explain, Kiyoshi first says that when he visited the café a year earlier, he was baffled by why people would return to the past knowing they couldn’t change the present. He decided to investigate the café’s patrons, and of 41 who returned to the past, four had gone back to meet people who had died. He spoke to Hirai, who visited her sister after she died in a road accident in Before the Coffee Gets Cold, and Hirai told him that she decided that she must decide to be happy as a legacy for her sister. Kiyoshi decided then to visit his wife, who had died 30 years earlier. On the day she died, he was supposed to meet her to celebrate her birthday in the café. He was held up at work, and when his wife left the café alone at closing time, she was killed in a mugging.

Related Titles

By Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Study Guide

logo

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Transl. Geoffrey Trousselot

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Transl. Geoffrey Trousselot