Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Before the Coffee Gets Cold is the first book in a series of books by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. There are three more books (Tales from the Café, Before Your Memory Fades, Before We Say Goodbye), and one is in print (Before We Forget Kindness). I purchased the whole series including pre-ordering the new book.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold is an interesting collection of interrelated stories of the same characters who work or visit the café where one can travel in time. But this time travel comes with lots of rules. To travel in time, one needs to wait for a ghost woman to get up and go to the restroom because that is the only chair where one can sit to travel in time. The ghost woman became a ghost because she stayed in the past for too long and the coffee got cold so now she must wait until someone else makes the same mistake, as every time traveller – and this is an important rule – can only time travel to the same café, where they can see the person but only if they visited the café before, and they must leave by the time the coffee gets cold. They also cannot get up from the chair or they would be immediately returned to the present. Also, the present cannot be changed so if one is visiting a dead person, they will still die, which time travellers find as the most frustrating rule and which explains why the café is not widely popular despite receiving media coverage and exposure.
So, in a collection of four-time travel stories, we learn about a story of a woman who time travelled to have another go at talking to her boyfriend who broke up with her after obtaining a job in the US and this time she gives him a chance to explain, and she learns new things including about his true feelings, which opens new possibilities for the future. In a second story, a wife wants to receive a letter from her husband with dementia, but she wants to receive it from him rather than let him go and time travel and potentially forget to return. In a third story, a sister goes back to see her sister again, one last time and to tell her stuff she did not say before and make amends including considering fulfilling her wishes. In the fourth story, a mother goes back to see the daughter she never got to know. A beautiful element of this story is that before this happened, we as readers knew that the daughter came to see her first and this is beautifully written. What most stories have in common is that time travellers are seeking closure and trying to see important people one more time, and make amends even if only for a few moments while the coffee is still hot.
This book is very unusual. Before the coffee gets cold is not your usual time travel story that deals with quantum physics or multiple universe theory. This time travel story is a story of imagination of a very creative mind and as such, the book is very compelling and different. In addition to that, the reader keeps worrying whether our characters will get stuck, forget to drink coffee before it gets cold and become ghosts. Thus, the book has an element of excitement too.
The book’s story is in Tokyo, Japan and I read an English translation. Once again, as with the Goodbye Cat (see review here), I wondered how I would feel had I read this book in Japanese, its original language. This book reads very well in English too, and it is no surprise it sold millions of copies and received acclaim, but I am convinced that in Japanese, it is an absolute masterpiece.
I am truly becoming a fan of Japanese literature and imagination because, even though it is not written in a style I normally like and some writing seems extremely simple (due to language barriers in my view), I just love the originality of thinking and the fact that Japanese authors simply have a different and very unique imagination. Interestingly, even though the characters are linked, this is again a collection of stories, which seems to be the thing I discovered so far with Japanese authors, and this is again very interesting.
I loved this!