Before the Coffee Gets Cold

 

I first heard of "Before the Coffee Gets Cold" from a friend of mine, who is an avid reader. The plot description she provided immediately intrigued me, as I love magical realism. One day, when I found myself searching at a bookstore for something to read, I was able to locate it.

The premise reminds me of a book I read a couple years back, "The Midnight Library," where the main protagonist who is unhappy with her life finds herself in a purgatory of sorts, specifically a library, where she can choose to jump into different versions of a new life by opening books.

The outcome? Obviously predictable. She of course realizes her life isn't so bad and there are different mutations of unhappiness no matter which alternate life she ended up choosing, so she chose to go back to her original life.

"Before the Coffee Gets Cold" has a similar premise: there is a small, underground cafe in Tokyo that has garnered a significant amount of publicity due to the fact that patrons can go back to a moment in their past or future. The catch (along with many other rules) is that they have to return to the present moment before the coffee in front of them goes cold, otherwise they are destined to remain in that moment as a ghost. 

Where this book supersedes "The Midnight Library" in its plot, however, is the fact that characters are unable to go back into their past or adjust future decisions to change anything that might impact them based on the moment they have experienced. 

As someone who loves stories like "The World Goes On" and movies like "Mystery Train" bringing together a thread of disjointed but eventually connected lives, I did like the way Kawaguchi wound the intersecting stories of the characters together in one setting.

There is a caretaker whose husband, Fusagi, comes to the cafe every day with a travel magazine and takes notes as he reads. The story of how he has developed Alzheimers and has nearly completely forgotten his wife, who decides to go back into the past to communicate with him before he came down with the disease, was especially poignant.

Additionally, the story of a regular patron, brash and flashy, audacious in the way she speaks her mind at all times, is also notable. Underneath her confidence and bombast, she harbors a deep-seated malaise toward her younger sister, who consistently comes to visit her in order to ask her to return home and help her run their family inn in a small town.

The way Kawaguchi explored the dynamic between the two, and also chipped away at the brusque layer of the older sister, was also notable.

There has been some criticism of the novel as well, part of which I agree with. It does read more like a play, as the author has a background in theatre. Nonetheless, I think it would be a great play and would definitely see it should he bring it to wider audiences. 

He is also redundant in the way he keeps reiterating the rules for time travel over-and-over again, and true, this repetition could have been omitted to make the story more concise.

Nonetheless, I do like that he didn't fall prey to the cliche of many time travel stories where the characters see things they are unhappy with and go back to either accept their lives or make the necessary changes to ensure tragedy doesn't beset them in the future. 

Rating: 6/10