{"id":440893,"date":"2026-05-23T01:41:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-23T01:41:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/440893\/"},"modified":"2026-05-23T01:41:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-23T01:41:14","slug":"a-salaryman-ghost-and-a-water-spirit-walk-into-a-coffee-bar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/440893\/","title":{"rendered":"A salaryman, ghost and a water spirit walk into a coffee bar"},"content":{"rendered":"

A spirit-attuned pop star, a yuki-onna (ghostly snow woman) who runs a neighborhood restaurant and the ghost of a teen girl unable to pass into the next world all walk into \u2014 not a bar, but a coffee shop.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a new spin on a classic joke, and also the premise behind Coffee Talk Tokyo<\/a>, a visual novel game from Indonesia-based Toge Productions launching May 21. Set in a near-future Tokyo infused with sci-fi and fantasy elements, a hodgepodge cast of characters gathers in a late-night coffee shop where they work through personal, professional and supernatural troubles.<\/p>\n

Coffee Talk Tokyo is the third entry in the series, which was previously set in a version of Seattle populated by humans, vampires and fairies alike. The first game in the franchise to make the trip over the Pacific trades those creatures of Western folklore for a menagerie of Japanese y\u014dkai (spirits) and ordinary humans who dabble in the fantastic \u2014 including a recently retired salaryman who also happens to be a kappa (water spirit) struggling to find meaning beyond work; a workaholic scientist raising a mixed-species daughter with her stay-at-home, half-beast, full-British husband; and a coffee shop assistant, whose futuristic prosthetics hint at a serious accident in their past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A spirit-attuned pop star, a yuki-onna (ghostly snow woman) who runs a neighborhood restaurant and the ghost of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":440894,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[225079,111,139,69,145,2673,194640,225080,225081],"class_list":["post-440893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-coffee-talk-tokyo","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology","tag-video-games","tag-visual-novel","tag-yokai","tag-yurei"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/440894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}