タイムスリップできる喫茶店

It was like a walk-in diorama, a stage set from a Dickens novel with mouldering furniture and a forlorn man behind the counter polishing glasses. The bell tinkled lightly, door opening with a creak, a light drizzle, and the wind making the windows shudder. I'd read about it in one of the "mania" Tokyo neighborhood tokushuu's on Suginami ward. One of the few classical music kissaten that refuse to buckle, assiduously polishing its china and porcelain hangings, tending to the chintz decorations and maroon vinyl banquettes. Some of them have become just the sort of distraught hole that caters to pensioners who squander their time watching the crud harden on darkened windows, but Violon is aging with a kind of doomed graciousness. It is nice to know that there are some people who devote their resources to upholding this sort of thing. What does it enshrine exactly? A kind of marooned passion with nowhere to dock, a specific hang-up, obsolete, faintly ridiculous, and because of that fact all the more desperately preserved. I hadn't felt so much of a loaded sense of trespass for a long while. Museums seldom have that power anymore; whereas caves of dusty antiques do. Just as lavishness and polish is oppressive, well-tended age is awesome.

There was one other person in the audience, facing the altar. A collection of flower-bell gramophone horns, vacuum tubes and an orchestral pit of other dated sound equipment. The altar was lined with lace, some pastoral-themed porcelain (country lass, farmer's son with straw hat, capering round an orchard, etc), and a very large and excessive lamp. Grandfather clocks, hanging oil lamps, large chests.