Book Review: The Coffee Shop Masquerade

Reviewed by Frankie Martinez

A moving novel of the goods and the bads—a kaleidoscopic view on the mystery of life

A young woman finds a mask at a church just outside of Padua, Italy days before her wedding. Enchanted by the stranger who tells her that the mask comes from the East and holds magical properties, she makes the mask a centerpiece in her new home with her husband.

Years later, the woman tells her grandchild, Mario Risso, the story of the mask, and after she passes, Mario brings the mask to Hong Kong, hoping to be impressed by the city and find out more about the mask.

However, he’s disappointed to find that not only is Hong Kong different than he imagined, but also that his Nonna’s mask, while very old, is just a regular mask. 

Determined still to make the trip worth his while, Mario ventures out of the city again and encounters a strange, hairy man named Monkey. He confides in Monkey about the mask and how it’s made the trip confusing for him, and Monkey offers to give the mask back to its rightful owner, along with giving him some advice: “Life is like that. The more you try to understand things, the less you know.”

But when Mario decides to hand over the mask, Monkey is gone. Without any other options and no desire to bring the mask back to Italy with him, Mario sees a small coffee shop and decides to leave the mask in the shop’s lost and found. 

After Mario leaves the curious mask at the shop, it becomes a witness, as well as an object of strange fascination, to the patrons and employees of the little Hong Kong coffee shop.

There’s Jasmine, an awkward barista who dreams of the spotlight after a reporter tells her she could be a model; Grace, whose on-the-rocks marriage is tested further when her husband’s boss tries to engage her in an affair; Rob, a grief-stricken Aussie who has come to Hong Kong looking for a way to help people, and more.

With a focus on a new character in each chapter, The Coffee Shop Masquerade shows that separate lives can become entangled not only by simply passing through the same coffee shop, but also in a shared yearning for deeper meaning in everyday occurrences.

Told in a third-person, omniscient perspective, the book’s strength lies in its portrayal of longing. Each character seems to be suffering from a missing hole in their life, whether it be a loss of a family member, a fight with a lover, or just the simple mundanity of the every day. Morton dives deep into a new character in each chapter with emotive exposition, and they are often on the brink of a breakthrough, ready to receive the thing that will make them whole and balanced, when we meet them at the coffee shop.

In one such story, Chris, an unlucky-in-love transplant to Hong Kong from Germany comes to the coffee shop hoping to find a real connection in the author of a classified ad: “Sincere, honest, Philippine girl seeks white European man 21-50 n/s for friendship + more.” Fixated on the usage of the word “sincere,” his chapter becomes a lamentation on the seemingly shallow girls he’d encountered after arriving in Hong Kong at cheap bars, culminating in a coffee shop date with the girl in that ad that turns out to be just like the others. Just like Chris, other characters in the book are more often than not left disappointed or similarly disillusioned by the trajectory of their interactions at the coffee shop.  

Because of this, The Coffee Shop Masquerade can be bleak. As easy as it is to empathize with a character because of what they’ve lost or their true desires, I found it equally difficult to identify any one character on the path toward their goal. There are some pushes to this direction with the mask and the character of Monkey acting as occasional interlopers who drop mystical hints in order to steer characters toward a certain way of thinking, but these direct calls to the Taoist philosophy feel somewhat underutilized. 

While elegantly written and sometimes playful in its narration, The Coffee Shop Masquerade is a book with no easy answers. It feels difficult because it can be that way on some days and some lives.

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