Opening
These chapters pivot from patrons’ stories to the café’s own family, intertwining grief, love, and the rules of time. A cryptic visit from a future girl foreshadows a mother-daughter meeting that gives purpose to pain. The result is the book’s emotional peak: time doesn’t change outcomes, it changes hearts.
What Happens
Chapter 3: The Sisters
A mysterious high school girl sits in the time-travel chair while Nagare Tokita works alone. She brushes him off but warms instantly to Kazu Tokita, which rankles him. When Kei Tokita returns from a doctor’s appointment and reveals she’s pregnant, the girl’s purpose becomes clear: she has come from the future to take a photograph with Kei. Using a card-thin camera from the future, Kazu snaps the picture. The girl downs her coffee, vanishes, and the vacated seat is immediately claimed by the woman in the white dress. Kazu is unsettled—no traveler has come before solely to see café staff.
Later, Kohtake asks after Yaeko Hirai, whose bar is closed. Nagare delivers the blow: Hirai’s younger sister, Kumi, died in a car accident three days ago after attempting to visit her. Hirai enters in mourning clothes yet acts flippant; her family blamed her at the funeral and shut her out. Kei hands over a letter Kumi left with her—one Hirai had once told Kei to throw away. Reading her sister’s final words, Hirai breaks down and begs to go back three days, knowing full well she can’t change the outcome—she only wants to see Kumi again.
When the ghost curses her for trying to take the seat by force, Kazu devises a workaround: she keeps offering the woman in the white dress refills, exploiting a rule the ghost can’t refuse. After eight cups, the ghost finally goes to the bathroom, and Hirai takes the chair. Kazu completes the ritual. Three days earlier, Hirai greets Kumi with open warmth and, before being asked, promises to return to their family inn, Takakura. Kumi weeps with joy; her dream has never been escape but to run the inn together. Hirai’s assumptions shatter. As the alarm stirrer warns the coffee is cooling, Kei urges her to keep her promise and drink. Hirai sips just as Kumi reenters—happy, alive—and returns to the present with a new resolve to honor her sister by rejoining her family.
Chapter 4: Mother and Child
Two weeks later, an email from Hirai reports peace and purpose at the inn. Fumiko Kiyokawa visits and asks if the future is reachable; Kazu answers yes—but since there’s no guarantee the person you want will be in the café at that exact time, almost no one tries. The mood darkens when Kei appears unwell. Her congenital heart condition is straining under pregnancy. That night, after closing, she confides to Nagare that she isn’t afraid of death so much as leaving her child alone, never knowing if they will be happy.
Fortune strikes: the woman in the white dress rises, leaving the seat free. Kei resolves to go to the future to see her child, even for a moment. Nagare objects, fearing the devastation if no one appears. Kazu overrides him and promises to arrange the meeting. Kei aims for ten years ahead but lands fifteen. Nagare and Kazu are away in Hokkaido, and a stranger runs the café. Despair lifts when a teenage girl enters—the same visitor from Chapter 3. Nagare calls to confirm: she’s their daughter, Miki.
The meeting starts awkwardly. Miki is quiet; Kei reads silence as resentment and guilt rushes in. As Kei prepares to return, Miki speaks: she’s been sad at times, but she’s “really glad for the life you gave me,” and thanks her mother. Kei understands, as Kohtake and Hirai did before her: the chair doesn’t change events; it changes the heart. Seeing her daughter well and kind grants her peace. She returns to the present in tears of joy. An epilogue notes Kei gives birth to a healthy girl the next spring, and Kazu reflects that the chair exists to give people the strength to carry on.
Character Development
Across these chapters, pain forces confession, confession unlocks truth, and truth reshapes resolve. Each character confronts a fear—of blame, of loss, of powerlessness—and emerges with a clarified will.
- Yaeko Hirai: From flippant detachment to softhearted commitment. She misreads Kumi’s desires, then learns her sister wanted to run the inn together. Her return determined to care for the family transforms her cynicism into purpose.
- Kei Tokita: From quiet terror of abandoning her child to peace rooted in love. Meeting Miki heals her fear of the unknown and steadies her for childbirth.
- Kazu Tokita: From strictly enforcing rules to bending them for compassion. She outwits the ghost and defies Nagare to safeguard Kei’s hope, revealing fierce loyalty beneath her cool exterior.
- Nagare Tokita: From bemused gatekeeper to protective husband. His resistance to Kei’s trip shows his care, even as Kazu’s intervention reframes what care requires.
Themes & Symbols
The chapters crystallize the book’s thesis on grief and agency. The rule that you cannot change the present frames a deeper truth: the heart can change. In both arcs, the past remains untouched, but the characters return with altered perspectives that release guilt and empower action. This is the essence of Healing and Emotional Closure and the paradox at the core of Acceptance and The Unchanging Present: external facts stay fixed while internal realities shift decisively.
Communication bridges the gaps that regret widens. Hirai’s tragedy springs from years of silence and assumption, answered at last by an honest exchange with Kumi. Kei’s fear stems from the impossibility of a lifetime’s conversation compressed into one moment; Miki’s words complete that conversation. These stories enact Love, Communication, and Regret as a pattern: love seeks speech; regret is the cost of silence; healing arrives when love finally speaks.
Symbols
- The Photograph: A physical bridge across time, the image captures continuity of parent and child, past and future, turning a fleeting meeting into enduring witness.
- The Alarm Stirrer: A timer you can hold. Its ticking urgency narrows focus to what matters most, forcing Hirai to prioritize promise over prolonging the moment.
Key Quotes
“I’m really glad for the life you gave me.”
Miki’s confession dissolves Kei’s central fear. The line reframes motherhood as a gift received as well as given, validating sacrifice and transforming uncertainty into gratitude-fueled courage.
“But Kazu still goes on believing that, no matter what difficulties people face, they will always have the strength to overcome them. It just takes heart. And if the chair can change someone’s heart, it clearly has its purpose.”
As closing credo, this articulates the novel’s argument: the café’s magic is therapeutic, not revisionist. The measure of a miracle is the courage it creates, not the events it alters.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
Together, these chapters serve as the book’s emotional finale. The future girl’s photo becomes the hinge that connects Hirai’s reconciliation to Kei’s reassurance, transforming episodic tales into an interlocked whole. By centering the café’s own family under the same unbreakable rules, the story universalizes its message: when time cannot be changed, love must be spoken, and hearts can still be mended. Kazu’s choice to bend the rules in service of compassion crowns her as the narrative’s moral center—and reveals the chair’s true work: not saving lives, but saving the people who must go on living them.