That Summer, at a Bakery Cafe Near Ochanomizu Station

That day, I had made my second transfer to reach my destination and was waiting for the train on the station platform.

The train had just left, and during the wait of less than ten minutes, I opened the book I had brought in my tote bag and followed the words. It was a bit heavy to carry around as a hardcover, but I had brought it because I felt it somehow matched my mood that day.

Suddenly, I took my eyes off the book I was reading and looked toward the opposite platform.

People waiting for the train just like me.
People walking in a hurry from one end of the platform to the other.
The pillars of the platform standing straight.


The scenery of the opposite platform that I was gazing at vaguely began to blend little by little with fragments of my memories,
and before I knew it, it had been replaced by the image of a platform at a different station.

The morning rush. A narrow platform.
People transferring from the yellow train to the orange train.

The sight of that station, which I had passed through and grown accustomed to many, many times for school from the end of my teens to my mid-twenties,
that scene.

And then, the memory increased in resolution even further,
arriving at a certain time and place in summer.

Eighteen years old. The summer of a ronin student.

The time I spent alone at a bakery cafe near the nearest station, having slipped away from the uncomfortable prep school,
that time.

I had fallen just short of getting into my first-choice university, and in the spring at the end of my third year of high school, I had made the choice to become a ronin.

I didn't really understand what my own 'will' was, and looking back now, it was a decision made more than half due to my father's influence.

The prep school in Ochanomizu that I started attending in April of that year was a world where the flow of time was different from what I had known before, as if it were cut off from society.

It was a place where sitting in the front row of the classroom to show the instructor your motivation, going to the self-study room early in the morning, and staying holed up there until late at night were considered virtues. There, it seemed that being evaluated meant scoring even one point higher than the person next to you and winning the competition.

It didn't take long for me to realize that none of that had any meaning to me and that it was all trivial.

I felt that my classmates, who blindly trusted the instructors and holed themselves up in the self-study room every day, were strange and distant beings. No matter where I was in that building, I felt uncomfortable, and little by little, my feet stopped heading toward the prep school.

During the gaps between classes and during lunch breaks,
I often spent my time at a bakery cafe near the station.
It wasn't particularly stylish or anything; it was just a common chain-like cafe.

The customers in the shop were a few students around my age, and the rest were mostly people who seemed to be working, like salarymen and office ladies.

Surrounded by people who didn't know me at all, and since I couldn't drink coffee yet at the time, I probably had an iced royal milk tea and some kind of Danish.

Mock exam scores, thoughts about my desired school,
the pressure I couldn't help but feel,
the impatience.

When such things floated into my mind,
sitting alone at a small table in the cafe, I would feel lonely and like I was about to cry.

I wanted someone I could confide in about the secrets I kept carefully tucked away deep in my heart.
I wondered how on earth I could ever meet such a person.

But at the same time, I also had this memory.

Me, sitting all alone,
at the bakery cafe.

My heart, while I was there all by myself,
was, for that moment, certainly liberated from everything.

In the moderately noisy cafe, the 'me' who was alone was blending into that space, yet the contours of my heart were clearer and more distinct than when I had been at the prep school just a while ago.

From the earphones I had put in, the expansive singing voice of Ann Sally, whom I liked to listen to at the time, was flowing.

'Everyone is the same, everyone is all alone.'

The woman to my right,
the man in the suit in front of me.

Here, everyone is all alone.
They are nothing.
They are just being with their own solitary selves.
There, there is no superiority or hierarchy.

That is how I felt.



A place and time where I was neither at home, at school, nor at prep school,
where I could become someone who was no one.

Perhaps this summer was the first time
I had ever spent my time like that.

Why did I suddenly remember that summer
while standing on the station platform?

Maybe it was because the book I was reading featured a university campus.

Now older than I was back then, I have safely graduated from university—though not my first choice at the time—and for some reason, I even finished graduate school, somehow managing to live as a working adult.

It is only recently that I have come to have a will of my own and live as my heart desires.

To get to where I am now, I went to cafes alone
time and time again to spend my time.

And from here on out, time and time again,
I will go to cafes alone.

Me, sitting alone in a seat at that shop.

That version of me, all alone,
is exactly the same person
as the eighteen-year-old ronin student I was that summer.