Espresso Love (A Dystopian Japan Novel) #Wattys2014

The Beginning

So I begin to search for the French cafe Shizuka and I had stumbled into a few weeks ago. It makes sense to begin there. Having Shirayuki is like having a helpful prompt - she isn't entirely useless.

It's called the L'Homme et La Mer from what I recall, which means Man and the Sea. Perhaps it is a play off of Ernest Hemingway's novel or a direct reference to Baudelaire's poem. Either way, the struggle of the man against the sea somehow carries much significance. I try to recite the poem but give up and find it on Google.

"Free man, you will always cherish the sea!

The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul

In the infinite unrolling of its billows;

Your mind is an abyss that is no less bitter.

You like to plunge into the bosom of your image;

You embrace it with eyes and arms, and your heart

Is distracted at times from its own clamoring

By the sound of this plaint, wild and untamable.

Both of you are gloomy and reticent:

Man, no one has sounded the depths of your being;

O Sea, no person knows your most hidden riches,

So zealously do you keep your secrets!

Yet for countless ages you have fought each other

Without pity, without remorse,

So fiercely do you love carnage and death,

O eternal fighters, implacable brothers!"

Several lines stand out to me, as if they are telling me something. Naoki Maeda, they say, you have already plunged into the sea. You are looking into the mirror. And at the same time, it dawns on me: I suddenly recall "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" that I had folded and tucked into my pocket, and promptly forgotten about. Eliot had been influenced by Baudelaire. There had been mention of tea and cups a few times through the poem and drowning in the sea. Somehow pieces fit together in my head, like magnets that jump on one another. Prufrock as the character himself, is full of fragmented thoughts and "clamour", insecure and hesitant, overly eloquent and intellectual while experiencing a segregation between self, the lover and the world around. Whether the man's acute thinking creates the segregation, or his surroundings and external influence created the excessive contemplation, is the argument of the chicken and the egg. In a sense, Prufrock might as well be the man in Baudelaire's poem. And I might as well be Prufrock.

I close the browser window, close my eyes and take a deep breath.

A moment later, Shirayuki leans in close. "You got an idea?"

I shake my head. Only tangents, I type.

It turns out L'Homme et La Mer, the cafe, was founded in 1982, by a woman named Kumiko Bordeaux who had lived in France, married a rich French man while studying to be a professional barista. They had later established a private farm in Indonesia and cultivated coffee plants, which they managed with hired staff even when they moved to Japan to start several coffee shops. After a marriage fall out, they sold their companies and divided the shares, all except for one cafe which Kumiko gave to her childhood friend. There is no mention of who this friend is. This was in 2001 around when the Twin Towers in Manhattan collapsed.