Toshikazu Kawaguchi - Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold #1)

Toshikazu Kawaguchi - Before the Coffee Gets Cold #1

4.5⭐

Genre: Fiction, Mystical Realism, Asian Literature, East Asian Literature, Japanese Literature, Short Stories, Book Series, Translated Books, Fantasy, Paranormal

Original Title: コーヒーが冷めないうちに

Original Language: Japanese

Translated by: Geoffrey Trousselot 

Pages: 213

Format: Paperback 

Publisher: Picador 

Date Published: 19th September 2019 

Book Blurb: 

What would you change if you could go back in time?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, and receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, the moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?

My Review: 

I have recently kindly been sent the third instalment of this series, Before Your Memory Fades, by Picador and decided to re-read the first two, to fully immerse myself into the plots and characters. I love mystical and magical realism and Japanese literature has plenty of that. Before the Coffee Gets Cold is not an exception. It brilliantly links mystical and magical realism with the important topics about life, loss, grief, forgiveness, second chances, and happiness. In only 200 pages this book has so much to give and so much food for thought about all of those topics. I loved it with all my heart.

The book follows four different stories all set in a small cafe in Tokyo. This cafe is not ordinary, it offers its customers a chance to travel in time, to the past and the future. However, there are strict rules that each customer needs to follow if they want to travel in time. They need to sit in a certain seat, they can’t change the future or the past and they can only travel to see people who previously visited this cafe. Oh…and they need to come back from the time travel before their coffee gets cold.

In this first instalment, we meet a girl who wants to travel back in time to tell her boyfriend not to leave her for work abroad opportunity. We also meet a wife that travels into the past to talk to her husband who is slowly losing his memory to Alzheimer’s. The third story is about a sister who wants to visit her younger sister who passed away one last time to make amends. The fourth story is about a mother who wants to travel into the future to visit her daughter, who she might never meet otherwise.

I loved that each of the stories has a lesson behind it and very gently discusses all the subjects of life, death, loss, grief, etc. Each story is very touching and features characters that as a reader you can easily relate to. One rule of the cafe is that you cannot change the past or the future no matter what, but although you can't change what happened or what might happen, travelling to the past or the future for these characters most of the time offers something better. Some characters got closure, some wanted forgiveness and some wanted to get permission to be happy from their loved ones. So, even though the past or the future didn’t change for those characters, seeing and speaking to a person they wanted to visit one last time, changed something within them, allowing each of them to move on in their way.

I also loved the atmospheric setting of the cafe and the fact that all of the stories and characters are somehow interconnected, which just shows that life is not as simple as we think it is. Stories also give a glimpse into the cafe's past and its owners, which just adds so much to the overall atmosphere and mysticism of this cafe.

Overall: It is a very unique book and has all the things that I love about Japanese literature.  Each of the stories in this book taught me something different and each of them allowed me to look at life, grief, loss, love and relationships in a different way. Heart-warming book that should be on everyone’s bookshelf and definitely a perfect read for long autumn nights. 

About the Author:

Toshikazu Kawaguchi (in Japanese: 川口 俊 和) was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1971. He formerly produced, directed and wrote for the theatrical group Sonic Snail. As a playwright, his works include COUPLE, Sunset Song, and Family Time. The novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold is adapted from an 1110 Productions play by Kawaguchi, which won the 10th Suginami Drama Festival grand prize. Before the Coffee Gets Cold is his debut as an author. It has become an international bestseller and has been adapted for the screen in Japan.

https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/toshikazu-kawaguchi/28093