At the very beginning of our dialogue, Ozawa asked me, “What kind of coffee do you like?”

To my own surprise, I answered almost instantly.

“I like many different kinds of coffee. I could never narrow it down to just one. But there is only one kind of coffee I dislike: coffee made by someone who believes that only their coffee is truly special.”

Ozawa gave it a name.

“Me-Me Coffee.”

Around the same time, I began writing a newspaper column centered on Café Bach. I did not feel the need to revisit Mamoru Taguchi’s books in preparation. Instead, I found myself returning to a different realization.

Coffee, by its very nature, possesses such an extraordinary degree of individuality that many assumptions people make elsewhere become strangely distorted when applied to it.

What is often called “originality” in art or expression is usually imagined as something that appears beyond technique or practice. Coffee does not fit that idea at all. Originality is already present before anyone attempts to express anything. It exists prior to intention, prior even to self-consciousness.

That is why I find it difficult to take seriously those who immediately speak of coffee as “self-expression.”

At the beginning of my career, I spent time near Café Bach. Its founder, Mamoru Taguchi, saw something different.

While most people carelessly mistook the individuality inherent in coffee itself for their own personal expression, he recognized the underlying principles. He distilled what might be called the royal road—the fundamentals that remain true regardless of fashion or personality.

Paradoxically, that commitment to universality became one of the most original achievements in modern coffee.

What do we choose as our standard?

Few questions matter more over the course of a life. Yet we should be cautious even with the word standard.

“There is one thing of which it can be said both that it is exactly one metre and that it is not one metre: the standard metre in Paris.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

However absolute a standard may appear, there is no further standard that ultimately justifies it. Even the foundation has no foundation beneath itself.

We should not look at the world through measurement alone.

I was never accepted into the Bach group. My background certainly played a part, but I also believe there was another reason.

I felt an overwhelming discomfort with the atmosphere surrounding me—an atmosphere that accepted this extraction of the “royal road” with too much innocence, as though it were something absolute. Or perhaps, even when it was not regarded as absolute, it was still understood as a form of expression.

As I have said before, I probably would have inherited Café Adachi someday regardless. But even without that family background, I doubt my path would have been very different.

I have never been someone who naturally belongs to a school or places himself under another person’s banner.

Once, there was a coffee shop that understood the essence of coffee while others mistook its inherent individuality for self-expression. It extracted universal principles, and in doing so became profoundly original.

Even now, these are the questions I continue to circle around.

They define, among other things, my own place as a coffee roaster.

More than anything personal, this may have something to do with the position I occupy in my work. In fact, I may even be moving toward such a role of my own accord. Because of my profession, I increasingly find myself meeting people who tell me they want to open a café. As the business I represent has begun appearing more often in local newspapers, I have become newly aware of this. During the final session of the second term of my coffee school, one participant asked if I would speak about running a café instead of the lesson I had planned. So I set my notes aside and spent the afternoon talking about the realities of operating one.

But I have probably spoken enough about management. More than enough. Perhaps it is time to stop.

After the class had ended, I found myself sitting quietly with my hands at rest, thinking about something else entirely. It was not about business at all, but about an incident a few days earlier that had left me with the unsettling feeling that I had ruined something.

Morning came, the day I was scheduled to travel to Tokyo for an appointment I had arranged. My mood had changed very little. I sat reading F. Scott Fitzgerald while eating an egg sandwich on black sesame bread and drinking an overly foamy soy latte. At Nagoya Station, before boarding the Shinkansen, that is almost always how I spend my time: chewing quietly, sipping slowly.

It was my second visit to Tokyo during the pandemic. Perhaps because of the season, the sight of people hiding the lower half of their faces behind colorful masks no longer felt especially strange. If anything, the city simply seemed crowded beyond measure. Carrying a single book, I wandered through Shinjuku and Shibuya, places overflowing with signs and symbols, and found myself wondering whether I had really spent the latter half of my teens and the first years of my twenties here.

Back then, my life in Tokyo had been part of something that had long been planned. Yet I had never fulfilled that plan in any orderly sense. If anything, I had squandered it.

The event from several days before still weighed quietly on my mind, and before I knew it, I had managed to spoil the appointment that had brought me to Tokyo as well.

With an unexpectedly long stretch of free time before me, I headed to Hatagaya to look at the coffee beans at Stumptown Coffee, the first time since visiting Portland. As Shuggie Otis drifted from a turntable, I rested my arms gently upon the worn scratches of an old wooden table and slowly tasted what had been served to me. A strangely familiar sense of time returned, and at last I felt myself begin to breathe more easily.

John Lennon left behind many blunt remarks that have since become little sayings of their own, and I have always been fond of most of them. But one in particular came back to me.

“Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.”

Resting my cheek on one hand, I gazed absently around the room, trying to understand what those words truly meant. Or perhaps there was no understanding at all. Perhaps my eyes were simply drifting through empty space, searching for something on which they might come to rest.

Why had I wanted to open a café in the first place?

There was a time when I casually said, almost as an excuse for the suspicion that I was unsuited to being an office worker, “Maybe I’ll open a café someday.” And then there was the later time, when that possibility began to take tangible shape.

The two periods seem to overlap.

In truth, they are entirely different.

The moment I realized this, it felt as though lightning had struck me. I stood up, paid my bill, and made my way toward a café near the neighborhood where I had once lived. Passing an old second-hand CD shop that somehow still remained, I walked toward a café I had not frequented all that often, yet one that had somehow retained a meaning I could never quite forget. I cannot explain why I felt drawn there. Beyond its old wooden gate, the room was astonishingly dark. What I remembered and what I had forgotten stood there with unmistakable clarity.

When people tell me they want to open a café, what they usually mean is something like this: life has become stifling; they want to do something they truly wish to do; perhaps they could at least try running a café.

I hear this kind of sentiment over and over again.

But what kind of hope is it that imagines, because life itself is not going well, opening a café somehow will?

A café, whatever anyone may choose to call it, is only one part of a life.

To imagine that life itself is failing while the small part of it called café management will somehow succeed is nothing more than wishful thinking. It is an extraordinarily optimistic illusion.

And it was, I realized, precisely the frame of mind I myself had once inhabited before I ever entered this profession.

The dimly lit café, sustained only by the last flicker of candlelight, was quietly approaching the end of its twenty-two-year life.

The owner, speaking with the voice one reserves for the final customer of the evening, mentioned almost in passing that the café would soon close its doors for good.

After paying, I looked up at him and thought about telling him who I was.

I never did.

I stepped back through the old wooden gate.

Then, almost without warning, something settled into place.

It had been nearly twenty years since I had last walked through that gate.

The meeting took place at a specialty coffee roastery in my own prefecture. Mr. Daibo had long since become something of a legendary figure in Japanese coffee culture, and many of those present seemed more interested in photographing him than listening to him. The atmosphere struck me as strangely ceremonial. Since I had not been invited there in any official capacity, I found myself standing apart from it all, quietly detached.

Then, during a coffee tasting, Mr. Daibo said something I have never forgotten.

“What are they talking about? Coffee tastes only of coffee.”

At the time, the room was filled with the increasingly elaborate vocabulary of professional tasting notes. His remark seemed less like a rejection of language itself than a gentle rebuke directed at the confidence with which people believed those words captured the coffee before them.

A little later, however, he himself described the coffee in very different terms.

“It tastes like a seventeen-year-old girl smiling.”

“It tastes like the blue sky after the rain.”

Some years afterward, I mentioned this episode to an older acquaintance who had spent many years working within CQI (the Coffee Quality Institute). His response was immediate.

“Daibo was never a realist.”

The comment stayed with me.

For a long time I found myself returning to that afternoon, not because I wished to decide whether Mr. Daibo had been right or wrong, but because I gradually realized that the question itself pointed elsewhere.

Again and again, with no one in particular to hear it, I found myself repeating a sentence by Shigehiko Hasumi:

“What has been forgotten is that realism itself is parody.”

That sentence has continued to unsettle me across the years. It is not merely an observation about literature. It names something I have repeatedly encountered in the world of coffee as well.

Just as language can never become the thing it describes, tasting vocabulary can never become coffee itself.

This should be obvious. Yet I have often felt the exhausting obligation to explain what cannot, in the end, be fully explained. Over the years I also noticed something else: people divided quite distinctly into those who immediately understood this difficulty and those who did not seem to recognize it at all.

Kojin Karatani expresses a closely related thought:

“To say that realism is the parody of narrative means that realism itself is quotation. What realism does, however, is make us forget precisely that.”

That, for me, is the decisive point.

Within the coffee world, I do not care how celebrated someone may be. If they mistake parody for representation—if they believe tasting vocabulary is the likeness of coffee itself—I cannot fully trust them.

The problem is not the vocabulary. Nor is it whether one possesses refined sensory ability.

The problem begins when words cease to be understood as figures and begin to be believed as reality itself.

What disappears at that moment is parody.

And I have come to think that the presence or absence of that awareness reveals something far more fundamental than whether someone is merely intelligent.

He spoke calmly about what he regarded as one of the great blessings of our time: that those of us who buy green coffee now live in an age of extraordinary abundance. If we wish, we can source extraordinarily rare coffees from almost anywhere in the world. Wealth, in this sense, appears as an ever-expanding range of possibilities.

As I listened, however, I was overcome by a curious sense of déjà vu, almost to the point of dizziness.

To say that our choices have multiplied may simply mean that something has become immeasurably vast. Coffee itself has always possessed that immeasurable quality. Seen from that perspective, it is worth asking why the mere expansion of options should so readily be mistaken for abundance.

Everywhere one looks, we seem to inhabit situations that ought to demand the sharpest attention, yet they are discussed almost exclusively in terms of whether they are prosperous or not. Within the coffee world as well, the sheer number of available choices is often taken as evidence of being “at the forefront.”

To me, however, this way of thinking suggests something else entirely. It feels less like a celebration than a quiet summons—a demand to decide what, beneath all these possibilities, we are truly facing.

For everything I have written here points me not toward abundance, but toward a poverty that can never be overcome: the poverty of meaning, of knowledge, of awareness; the poverty that belongs to human life itself; even the poverty concealed within the very notion of choice. Coffee has always seemed inseparable from that condition.

I do not think of coffee as something healed by abundance, but as something that quietly accompanies an irreducible poverty.

This is not only because I remember the countries where coffee is grown, where prosperity and deprivation exist side by side like parallel lines that never meet. It is also because I cannot forget the people whose lives unfolded around coffee itself.

What returns to me, again and again, is the conviction—almost a kind of faith—that coffee has always belonged to places where choices are few. It is there, under the narrowest of conditions, that it continues to live. And it is there, somehow, that it continues to come into being.

There were several reasons why a young man from a small rural town in Gifu Prefecture found himself making the journey to Minami-Senju, Tokyo. The greatest was a single piece of advice.

At the suggestion of my future wife, I had begun studying coffee with Koku Coffee, a small roastery in Minokamo. One day they told me, quite simply, “You should go to Bach.”

Looking back on my life, I cannot think of a piece of advice from another person that proved more valuable.

The people at the Bach Training Center struck me as rather strange. At least, that was how they appeared to me then.

What they all shared was an extraordinary reverence for Mr. Taguchi, who led the program.

At the time, I did not really understand him. I liked his writing, certainly, but I understood little about coffee itself. In fact, I had barely ever drunk it black. Nor, if I am honest, did I find the atmosphere particularly comfortable.

Back then—as, regrettably, even now—I had the habit of leaning against walls whenever I stood. During roasting demonstrations, while everyone else gathered respectfully around the instructor, I would drift away from the group, fold my hands behind my back, lean against the wall, and simply watch.

I watched absent-mindedly.

Some may even have thought I was smirking.

One day I suddenly felt an arm around my shoulders.

Turning my head, I found Mr. Taguchi standing beside me.

“Do you know who I am?”

I looked back at him without changing my expression.

He, however, remained perfectly serious.

“You don’t think much of me, do you?

I don’t mind people like that.

If this were a school, I’d probably knock some sense into you. But this isn’t that kind of place.

There are two things in how people conduct themselves: their manners and their way of being.

Manners are shaped by institutions. Schools can teach them.

But a person’s way of being—that belongs to something much deeper.

And yours…

Well, I rather like it.”

With that, he turned away without waiting for a response.

My own way of being probably changed very little after that day.

My manners, however, changed completely.

From then on, I wrote down every word he spoke with absolute concentration, determined not to lose a single sentence. Many of the notes I took during those sessions were so abstract that, even now, I continue to think about them.

Looking back, I believe it was the quiet rhythm of reading those notes again and again, returning to them over cups of coffee, that gradually met whatever had already existed within me.

Somewhere in that meeting, almost everything I now understand about coffee was formed.

Recently, one of them came to visit from Hyogo Prefecture. After spending many years with a large roasting company, bringing that chapter of his life to a close, and passing through a few events that followed, he was preparing to open a shop of his own. He drove all the way to see me.

At one point our conversation turned toward a passage by the Japanese critic Shigehiko Hasumi.

“Method is commonly imagined as something systematic, something that precedes practice and gives it direction. People endlessly argue over whether such a thing exists, while rarely questioning the vague image they already hold of it. Yet method is a strangely unsettling thing. Everyone speaks of it, but no one has ever actually seen it. And any method that could simply be pointed to would possess no real power to intervene in reality. Method is judged only by whether it functions. It runs through us only in the very moment of practice; it neither waits beforehand nor lingers afterward.”

The weather that afternoon was unsettled. Bursts of loud conversation occasionally swept through the café, making sustained concentration almost impossible. We did not have the luxury of a long discussion.

Even so, after leaving our seats, we found ourselves standing before the Probat roaster, and what we spoke about there was not methods of roasting, but roasting and method.

Hasumi continues:

“Method is not a luxury by which we arm ourselves intellectually. It is a momentary movement that passes through us, disarming us instead. When something truly functions, method no longer resembles anything one would ordinarily call a method. It wears a strange face—something almost animal, almost violent. Perhaps method neither exists nor does not exist. It surely occurs somewhere, perhaps even now, yet remains invisible.”

There seems to be such a thing as method in roasting.

Or so I have often believed.

Looking back, however, I wonder whether what brought me here was method at all. Perhaps it was simply that I had no choice but to pass through countless moments of noise, uncertainty, and confusion. Memory has a way of arranging experience into coherent narratives. It is entirely possible that this, too, is one of them.

What interests me now is no longer method itself.

It is what appears afterward—what emerges as difference once one’s way of approaching method has been lived through.

Within coffee, that difference rarely seems to reveal itself in the beans alone. More often, it becomes visible in the total shape of an enterprise: in the rhythm of a place, in its decisions, in the manner by which it continues to exist.

That, at least, is what I have been thinking about lately.