"Cafe stories to read in a coffee break", a collection of short stories, each with a different cafe as a backdrop.
The full title of this book translates to "Readable in 3 minutes! For reading during coffee breaks: Stories of cafes". The "3 minutes!" bit is part of a series, other books in this series include titles like "be surprised in 5 minutes!" or "have a laugh in 5 minutes!" Basically they are meant to be short stories with a theme, and the theme for this one is cafes. Besides the cafe settings, most of the stories also came with a twist at the end.
The twists are perhaps fitting for the mystery department that published this book, but the short story format means any mystery element readers might find are going to be relatively shallow. Not to mention that two of the stories used a similar mechanism, so one of them kind of spoiled it for the other. Reading these stories from the mystery angle is probably not the best way to go about it. Instead, what should be expected are a collection of light reading material that can be consumed in short breaks, exactly as promised by the title.
The stories collected here aren't necessarily consistent in quality, although they are generally decent. One of the stories is definitely vulgar, but its title clearly advertised it as such, and honestly it was one of the more memorable and fun stories. Other than that one, most of the stories aren't selective of their readers, and at least two of them has gotten sufficient mass appeal to be highlighted in NHK's "Reading Japan" program. That NHK program is where I first learned about this book, although I would recommend reading the 3 minute originals in this book first before watching the 20 minute renditions by NHK since it's a greater spoiler going in the opposite order.
Overall, I enjoyed the variety and the small dosage format offered by this book. Some of the stories don't have much replay value because their twists might not be effective the second time around, but this series seems like a promising one to follow.
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Next (2023-01-09): "5fun de Waraeru! Obaka de Yukai na Monogatari"