OUAN603 - The Coffee House as a Plot Device

Internal thoughts and feelings are presented as concrete events, not an individuals experience.

One of the key plot points in the story, is the scene where Takahiro enters the Coffee House for the first time on a rainy day in Tokyo, and perceives the location of the missing Masumi Miyamoto in the form of a vivid day dream. This experience as a whole and the mystery surrounding the coffee house is one of the key aspects of magical realism in the story. Nothing in the story is explicitly impossible, nor is it fantasy per se, and it was important to me that all of the mysterious and vague elements of the story such as this were kept feasible in their interpretation. For example, entering a meditative state and the notion of day dreaming are both familiar and realistic concepts, but the way they are described and presented in a novel context can make them seem more magical than they perhaps are. This technique allows the story to progress through a magical and surreal manner, as long as the characters and/or the narrator accept them as ordinary and not extraordinary experiences.

The purpose of the coffee house in the story is that, although not specified is that it only appears in the rain and thus straight away has magical theme tied with it. Perhaps this is merely a characters perception of the location or their imagination running wild. This was something I felt Haruki Murakami does in his novels, where the character's mental state and internal thoughts create perceptions of things but instead of being specified as internal thoughts and feelings are presented as concrete events, not an individuals experience.

As well as being a tool for generating mystery and surrealism, the coffee house acts as a device that allows Takahiro to generate visual clues in his mind on the whereabouts of Masumi Miyamoto. In his view, the coffee house only appears when it is raining. Throughout the rain is a key theme and [in chapter 3] there is an announcement of the coming of the rainy season, he takes these opportunities to get to enter the coffee house and it to find out more about Masumi and further his investigation. The story somewhat implies that the atmosphere inside the coffee shop and the conditions of the lighting, sounds and overall comfort inside is what allows him to relax and concentrate his thoughts or pass into a mindfull state, so the actual functioning magical elements are left option to interpretation rather than being portrayed as concrete to the audience.