By Tino Cao
On Haruki Murukami
Once, I had a layover in Japan, just one day, one night, on my way home from the U.S. to Vietnam. A night that never quite completed itself, a day that never quite began. That morning, Tokyo’s sky was dim and cloud-heavy, like a sheet of tired glass, and I drifted through it like a ghost, still lost between time zones. I had no particular plan, just the vague impulse to sit in a Japanese café. Not to drink anything, I’d had enough caffeine over the twelve-hour flight from Washington Dulles to Narita, but to take shelter. More precisely, I was looking for a quiet place to retreat from the sense of estrangement that clings to you in a city where everyone always seems half a step ahead.
Carrying only a small backpack, I boarded the Narita Express to Tokyo, then wandered on foot from Ueno Station into the backstreets of an old residential neighborhood. The wind was soft, not cold, but some invisible sadness swept gently across the back of my neck. A café appeared down a narrow, quiet street, as if it had been waiting for me: a modest wooden sign, not too bright; a fogged-up glass door; and inside, the warm yellow light of a single lamp pooling softly over the tables. Everything seemed designed with deliberate restraint, no empty chairs, no unnecessary presence.
I took a seat by the window and ordered a hot blend. The waitress didn’t smile, but she wasn’t distant either. She simply existed, absorbed in the rhythm of familiar tasks. Had I not walked in, she might have gone on polishing cups forever, caught in some timeless loop that required no beginning or end. A faint jazz tune by Chet Baker floated through the space, so soft, I worried that breathing too hard might break it.
It struck me then: coffee in a Japanese café isn’t meant to keep you awake. It doesn’t serve a social role, as it does in Italy, nor does it carry the ease of casual conversation, like it does in Vietnam. It’s something people reach for when they need silence. When they need a space built just tight enough to cradle a restless mind, and wide enough to let a quiet sadness expand without disturbance.
In the novels of Haruki Murakami, cafés are where people are allowed to show their truest selves. There, no one needs to smile, explain, or hurry. His characters can sit alone for hours, with nothing more than a cup of coffee and a table. No one urges them to do anything. They are free to think, or not. To remember a former lover, or to imagine someone who never existed. No one asks, “are you okay?”, or “why are you having coffee by yourself?” - because even those questions would be an unwelcome intrusion.
Strangely, I found myself understanding that kind of space. Of course, I’m not Japanese. I don’t live in Tokyo. But when I sit in a café like that, it feels as though I’m returning to some primal corner of myself, the part of the mind that doesn’t need to be put into words, the part I’ve preserved through countless acts of self-erasure.
There’s something unmistakably Japanese in the way space is arranged: every object has its place, and that place isn’t about “efficiency” but harmony. The chair isn’t positioned where it’s most convenient, but where the room stays in balance. Even the cup of coffee is never filled to the brim. It’s poured just enough, enough to make you feel held, not adrift.
I’ve tasted the sharp bitterness of espresso in Manhattan, the burnt robusta at Cong Quynh in the dusty heart of Saigon, café crème in an unassuming café near Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, and a crisp, cool drip coffee at Gallery Drip Coffee in the bustling streets of Bangkok. Each place left a trace in my memory, like how I once carved dates into the trunk of a bodhi tree beside Long Son Pagoda, marking summers of my school years spent with friends.
But Japanese coffee - that melancholic, neutral, and unremarkable coffee - is what stays with me the longest, because it leaves the deepest impression. It doesn’t try to make you like it. It doesn’t compete with the sadness inside you. It sits quietly beside you, like a friend who doesn’t ask anything, but is always there.
I don’t remember how long I stayed in that café. I only recall that when I stood up, the outside world no longer felt so loud. And for a fleeting moment, I forgot which country I was in.
That late afternoon, I wandered aimlessly through the quieter streets behind Omotesando, not far from Shibuya Station. The rain had just stopped, the pavement still patchy with wetness, and the last light of day was beginning to slip through the dense canopy overhead. I found myself once more stepping into a café, tucked between two low-rise concrete buildings, a faded wooden space with no signage, just a single bronze bell dangling before the door. As I slid open the glass, the bell let out a soft chime, just enough to send a hush rippling through the room.
Behind the counter stood a woman with her hair neatly tied back. She looked up at me as if she’d known I would come. There was no menu. Only a quiet question, in gentle English: “What would you like to drink… to remember?”
That question stayed with me for a long time. Not “What would you like that’s good?”, but “to remember”. I imagined, in that moment, that every cup of coffee here was more than a beverage, it was a quiet way of marking memory. I gave an arbitrary answer: “Black coffee, not too bitter.”
She smiled. “There’s no such thing as coffee that’s not bitter. Only coffee at the right time”.
I said nothing. Perhaps she was right.
Sometimes, the bitterness of coffee, on a short, rainy Tokyo afternoon, is the only warmth left that can still be held.
I sat down on a worn-out cushion, its fabric frayed with time. The café felt like a sealed wooden box - dim light spilling softly over every surface, the hiss of old jazz playing in the background, and the mingled scent of roasted coffee and aging timber lingering in the air. No one spoke. In the corner, an elderly man bowed over a book, turning the pages slowly through a magnifying lens. Across the room, a young couple sat face to face, yet did not look at each other. Each seemed to have stepped into their own private silence, and coffee - only coffee - served as their passport, allowing them to remain in that inner world without being cast out.
It dawned on me that, in Murakami’s world, no one drinks coffee simply for the taste. They drink it to uncover something within themselves. These cafés - from Tokyo to Sapporo, from chaotic avenues to nameless backstreets - are not places of conversation. They are pauses in the journey. Stations where people quietly put down the heavy things they carry in their heads and hearts, so they don’t have to drag them along for a while. Sometimes just for half an hour. Sometimes for an entire winter.
I remember reading “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage”, a passage where Tsukuru sits in a small café, thinking about the friends who had once left him behind. There is no climax. No tears. Only coffee slowly going cold, and thoughts glowing faintly like charcoal embers. In that world, sorrow doesn’t need to cry out to be acknowledged. It only needs a table, a cup of coffee, and someone who won’t walk away in the middle of it.
Someone once asked me, “why are you so fond of cafés?”, I couldn’t give a clear answer. Maybe it’s because there are too many places in life where we must perform - at work, with clients, timing our smiles, nodding at the right intervals. But inside a Japanese café, I’m allowed to be nothing at all. No one asks what I do for a living. No one wonders where I’ve come from. I can sit there, like a soft blur, and still be accepted as part of the room.
There were moments when I wished I could live my whole life like that - not as a form of escape, but as a choice to dwell in a space where I don’t need to be on guard. A space with structure but no rigidity, with order but no demand. Like the café described in “After Dark”, where time flows without clocks, and people fall gently into each other’s lives without making a sound.
Coffee, in Murakami’s stories, is never just a taste. It’s an event. It arrives at the moment a character is about to step into another stratum of reality, or when they are on the brink of facing themselves. As though the bitterness of coffee were the final threshold to the inner world. And the café - a borderland - where the real and the dream are separated by nothing more than a thin pane of glass. Sit in the right spot, and you can glimpse both realms without ever rising from your chair.
I’ve come to believe that space - its shape, its silence - can quietly transform how we perceive the world. A café deep enough, quiet enough, makes you think differently. Perhaps that is why Murakami never places his characters in noisy bars or slick chain cafés. They need space to remember, to forget, to drift, or to fall freely into a dream from which no one is trying to wake them.
Once, back when I lived in Saigon, I asked Yuki - a Japanese intern at my office - “why do so many cafés in Japan look so sad?”. He laughed and replied, “because no one wants to drink coffee in a place that pretends to be happy” - even though he loved discovering the vibrant cafés of Saigon. I understood. Joy is easy to find - in parks, in shopping malls, in karaoke bars. But sorrow, the soul’s necessary nutrient, can only live in places that are quiet, small, shadowed, and sparse. That’s what a Japanese café is: a kind of spiritual borderland, a silent monastery for the wandering mind.
I left Tokyo the next morning, just as the sun broke the horizon, though its light had yet to penetrate the delicate mist. I don’t remember the name of the café, didn’t record the address, didn’t take any photos. Some places aren’t meant to be captured by coordinates or images. They exist only in memory, in a smell, a tune, a slow, lingering glance. And in Murakami’s world, all things that matter are remembered that way: irrational, silent, and unforgettable.
And I - drifting through many cities - sometimes need only to recall a café like that, and it’s enough to believe that this world still has a quiet corner for those who don’t wish to scream in order to be seen.
Linkback:
https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=126205.0
