There’s an … idea? Trope? Not sure what the best word is … in Japanese myth that kindness to cats will be repaid. Be kind to cats, give them help, and they will repay that favor at some point in the future. This is the English translation of a Japanese best-seller about that notion.
The Full Moon Coffee Shop isn’t in a fixed location, and it isn’t something just anyone can find. It only appears at the full moon, for starters, and it only appears for the right people to find. There is no menu; one neither orders nor pays. The staff simply presents you with a drink or a dish, and it is invariably exactly what you wanted.
The staff also happens to be cats, that are also planets.
This tells the story of a small group of people, tenuously connected. There’s a television publicist, who has to tell a television star that she has been fired because of a scandal with a married man; there’s the television star herself; there’s a hairstylist who recently quit her job at a successful salon to work in her parents’ salon; there’s an IT worker who is constantly plagued by glitches; there’s a substitute teacher turned scriptwriter who used to be a rising star, and has since suffered failure after failure. The connection between them is that they used to walk to school together: the first four, escorted by the scriptwriter/substitute teacher. They weren’t in the same year, and they weren’t friends. But they were all there.
They are all, to one degree or another, dissatisfied with their lives. The cats, which as I said are also planets, welcome to the Full Moon Coffee Shop, and read their horoscopes. The wisdom they provide from their star charts isn’t prophetical; there’s nothing about all about what will happen to the people in question. Rather, they’re told things about themselves, aspects of their personality they need to embrace or accommodate if they want to live a harmonious life. No easy answers or quick fixes, but things that might, with work and more than a little courage, put their feet on a better path.
There’s not really a plot here as such. You get brief introductions into one character, and then they end up at the coffee shop and get feline advice. Then the book switches to the next point of view, which is that of a minor character in the prior character’s story, and the process repeats. We get glimpses of the former characters in the stories of the latter characters, providing at least hints of how they handled the advice they were given.
It’s all very heartwarming. This is the epitome of cozy fantasy, as far as I’m concerned. Low stakes, no physical danger, just people living their lives and hopefully living them a little better. I recommend waiting a few months until the fall sets in, and then reading it outside on a cool day with a warm beverage of your choice.
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