Before the Coffee Gets Cold

There were three large antique wall clocks in the café. The arms of each, however, showed different times. Was this intentional? Or were they just broken? Customers on their first visit never understood why they were like this. Their only option was to check their watches. [Goro] did likewise. While looking at the time on his watch, he started rubbing his fingers above his right eyebrow while his lower lip began to protrude slightly.

“Even if you return to the past, reveal your feelings, and ask him not to go, it won’t change the present.”

[…]

“Why?” Fumiko asked Kazu, her eyes begging for answers.

“Why? I’ll tell you why,” Kazu began. “Because that’s the rule.” There tends to be, in any movie or novel about time travel, some rule saying, Don’t go meddling in anything that is going to change the present. For example, going back and preventing your parents marrying or meeting would erase the circumstances of your birth and cause your present self to vanish.

This had been the standard state of affairs in most time-travel stories that Fumiko knew, so she believed in the rule: If you change the past, you do change the present. On that basis, she wanted to return to the past and have the chance to do it afresh. Alas, it was a dream that was not to be.

“I know how much your work means to you. I don’t necessarily mind if you go to America. I won’t stand in the way.”

I thought we were going to be together forever. “But, at least…”

Was it only me thinking that?

“I wanted you to discuss it with me. You know, it’s pretty despicable just deciding without talking about it.”

I really, truly…

“That’s just… well, you know…”

…loved you.

“It made me feel forgotten. What I wanted to say was…”

Not that it’s going to change anything…

“Well… I just wanted to say that.”

Fumiko had planned to speak honestly—after all, it wouldn’t change the present. But she couldn’t say it. She felt that saying it would be to admit defeat. She would have hated herself for saying anything like, Which do you choose—work or me? Until she had met Goro, she had always put work first. It was the last thing that she wanted to say. She also didn’t want to be talking like a parody of a woman, especially to a boyfriend three years her junior—she had her pride. She also was perhaps jealous that his career had overtaken her own. So she hadn’t spoken honestly. Anyhow… it was too late.

“Fine then, go… whatever. It’s not as if anything I say will stop you going to America.”

After saying this, Fumiko gulped down the rest of her coffee. “Whoa.”

“I thought that it was only a matter of time before you started liking other, better-looking guys.”

Never… How can you think that!

“I always thought that…”

Never!

It was a shock to Fumiko to hear him confess this for the first time. […]

When she asked if he loved her, he would nod, but he never said the words I love you. When they walked down the street together, Goro would look down sometimes, almost apologetically, and stroke his right eyebrow. Goro had also noticed that men walking down the street were always gawking at her.

Surely he hadn’t been hung up on that.

Yet, as she thought that, Fumiko regretted her own thoughts. While she saw it as his little hang-up, for him it was a painful, long-standing complex.

I had no idea he felt that way.

Amid the anxiety and fear of losing his memory, he was hoping that she would continue to be his wife. She was always in his heart.

There was more proof of this to be found. Even after losing his memory, he could content himself by looking at travel magazines, opening his notebook, and jotting something down. She had once looked at what he wrote. He had been listing the destinations that he had traveled to in order to visit gardens. She had simply assumed his actions were a hangover from his love of his work as a landscape gardener. But she was wrong. The destinations he made a note of were all the places that he had visited with her. She didn’t notice at the time. She couldn’t see. These notes were the last handhold for Fusagi, who was gradually forgetting who she was.

If, for example, a gunman came from the future and fatally shot a customer—as long as the customer was living in the future, he could not die, even if he had been shot in the heart.

That was the rule.

[…]

The surgeon might say later that if the ambulance had been one minute later or if the bullet had been located one millimeter to the left, the patient would not have survived. All the staff would say that it was a miracle the patient survived. But it wouldn’t be a miracle. It would be because of the rule which dictated that the man who was shot in the past must survive.

But [Hirai] was wrong. Kumi didn’t resent her. Nor was it true that she didn’t want to inherit the inn. The reason that Kumi didn’t give up trying to persuade Hirai to return was because that was her dream. It wasn’t because she wanted her own freedom, and it wasn’t because she was blaming her: it was her dream to run the inn together with Hirai. That dream had not changed, and nor had her little sister, who was there in front of her with tears of joy streaming down her face. Her little sister Kumi, who had loved her big sis with all her heart, had, time after time, come to persuade her to return to the family, never giving up. […] Hirai felt more love for Kumi than she ever had before.

The magazine piece on the urban legend had stated, “At the end of the day, whether one returns to the past or travels to the future, the present does not change. So it raises the question: just what is the point of that chair?”

But Kazu still goes on believing that, no matter what difficulties people face, they will always have the strength to overcome them. It just takes heart. And if the chair can change someone’s heart, it clearly has its purpose.

But with her cool expression, she will just say, “Drink your coffee before it gets cold.”