Hot Chocolate on Thursday

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

While the saying goes, ‘you can never have too much of a good thing’, we all know this is false. Everything in moderation is a much healthier mantra to live by. After the slightly amusing but overly unimpressive Throne in the Dark, I felt it was definitely time to take a step away from fantasy for a bit, so this week I have moved on a little bout of cosy, Japanese, slice-of-life fiction.

Tucked away amid the cherry blossoms along a river in Tokyo sits the Marble Café. It’s a quaint and cosy place where one can have a hot drink, pass the time, and perhaps have a special encounter. Here, a woman sips hot chocolate while writing a letter to her pen pal. The manager admires her from afar. A working mother makes plans for her son’s lunch, while a friend quickly rushes out to buy another friend something blue for her wedding. Life is made up of meetings and moments, many of which seem so insignificant but end up making the biggest differences in our lives.

Japanese slice-of-life novels are fast becoming my new favourite genre for cosy, recreational reading. There is something about the uplifting collection of short stories centred around a specific location that has the power to really pull me out of any life-funk that I’m on the verge of slipping into. Hot Chocolate on Thursday definitely did this for me. It’s a sweet and wholesome collection of stories, each one a different chapter with a colour as a narrative focal point, that hold nothing in common with each other but the fact that the characters are each somehow linked to Marble Café or its mysterious founder, the Maestro.

Despite the absence of a central plot, there is a definite flow in the progression of each story, as every chapter is a tale told from the point of view of a person we met in the previous chapter. Messages of work-life balance, love, and the health benefits of shifting perspectives fill every page to make the book a warm and gentle reminder that even though the anxieties of life can become overwhelming, they can be broken down piece by piece and everything can be OK in the end. The lightest touch can disturb a still body of water and this book really plays with that image but instead of disturbing calm, it’s rippling common life problems and reshaping them so that the characters (and the reader) can see them differently and change the way they respond to them.

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

Hot Chocolate on Thursday is a warm, soothing, and delightful book. It really is like a cup of chocolate: a smooth procession of stories that are tinted with a slight bitterness but are then overcome with a spreading sweetness that manages to reach every part of the body and mind. I absolutely adored it!

Author: Michiko Aoyama, 2017. Translated by E. Madison Shimoda.

Published: Original Japanese edition published by Takarajimasha Inc., Tokyo. First published in Great Britain by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, Penguin Random House, 2026.