"Espresso Love" by @takatsu
Review and recommended by MT.
Shizuka Kaneko tells our narrator, Maeda Naoki, "Things are starting to change." They discuss coffee and Samuel Beckett, and she introduces him to the world of the unknowable. Is it real or of her making or his? Are we in the depths of a philosophical search or a dystopian dream?
Shizuka, we soon learn, can hear others' thoughts and she has focused in on Maeda, perhaps to save him-or herself.
We have a writer interested in the collective unconscious, yes Carl Jung, and its possibilities when faced with a Kafka-esque unknown enemy.
But, "Love is the answer. Now, what was the question?", as I like to say.
This problem, perhaps not exactly as I posed it but pretty close, pervades the telling and pushes the reader forward. In the chapter entitled "Making Ripples" the possibility of love takes over when the dystopian world Takatsu has created opens to the conflict of deeper awareness of another, the draw of another, essentially the effect of the conflicted-hope that love has on the heart, as their "red coats merge into one."
The question, or is it the answer? of choosing another, of choosing love in the face of life's chaos now begins to emerge more firmly and the dystopian world takes on less force in its current.
The issue of loneliness enters their sphere and ours, as the Ferris wheel of the dystopian world whirls.
Caught in the whirl of their own current, Shizuka and Maeda become less vigilant-and more visible to others. Love can be seen. It can be photographed. It marks them.
You will have to read the novel to find out what happens. But you will have learned something more about the unknowable-and about love.
And let's hope that in the world, dystopian or unknowable or imagined or perceived, we find folks who read the poetry of Pablo Neruda, a key allusion in the novel, in the face of the unexplainable.
Write it! Takatsu seems to say and I am with him on that journey.
YOU ARE READING
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