Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Before the Coffee Gets Cold – Tales from the Café is the second book in the series by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. I wrote about the first part here.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold – Tales from the Café continues to follow stories from a café in Tokyo where people can come and time travel but following strict rules; you can only travel once and from a specific chair in the café inhabited by a ghost woman who goes to the restroom once a day; time traveller cannot move from the chair, they cannot change the present regardless of what they say or do and they can only stay for as long as a cup of coffee is warm; they need to leave before the coffee gets cold or they will dye and be a ghost in the café. These rules are the same in both books, but this second book continues with the same characters as with the first book, so we learn more about them, for example, who the ghost woman is, and more about the life stories of café staff and some permanent guests.
The time travellers are different but stories of time travellers from the previous book are mentioned. In this book, the time travellers include a man who raised his friend’s daughter following his death, so he wants to meet his friend again and take a video of his friend wishing his daughter, who is getting married happy life. Also, a bankrupt son goes back in time to see his deceased mother who he did not manage to see after she ended up in a hospital and he was unable to afford to come to a funeral. A man from the future is in a café trying to meet his girlfriend to make sure she is happy and living her life to the fullest. A detective wants to see his wife and travels to the past to give her a birthday present he never managed to give her due to her sudden death.
The difference between this book and the first one is that it has characters who come to the café to travel to the past, but it also has characters who suddenly turn up as time travellers and there is more dialogue, more personal stories and more intertwining of characters so it reads even better than the first book.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold – Tales from the Café again starts with a page with just one question, ‘if you could go back, who would you want to meet?’ The book then keeps questioning this, who people want to see one more time and why; despite knowing they cannot change anything, but they go anyway. The author once again created a diagram at the beginning of the book explaining who the people in the book are, which is both interesting and helpful. Names are distinctively Japanese and many start with the letter K so this diagram is helpful as the reader can go back and remind themselves who the person is.
Very interesting and unusual. This is not a conventional time travel story, and the central theme of this book – as well as the first one – is not time travel per se, as this is not elaborated in detail or the focus – but who people want to see, why and how visiting their loved ones helps them move ahead. A further exploration is the notion of people who decide to go back, never return and become ghosts but then see things differently, go back and decide to live their lives the way the person they visited would want them. Things are never what they seem …
I love this book series. It is different from anything I normally read. Very, very creative and insightful, asking questions that truly matter!
Thank you for reading!