We’re off to a Japanese coffee shop to drink a cup before it gets cold. But I don’t even like coffee!
Coffee – the blurb
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, 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, 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?
A time traveling ghost story?
This year I’ve really tried to broaden my reading – classics, foreign authors, poetry – you name it, this year I’ve read it. Before the coffee gets cold is a continuance of that as it’s actually Japanese fiction. I wasn’t sure what to make of the concept – a time traveling café complete with resident ghost but it looked short and I was attracted to the beautiful light reflecting cover.
At first I struggled with names (something I always do when reading non Anglicised names) but the characters were few and I did settle into it. The writing was brief yet strangely detailed. The clothes each person was wearing, the exacting descriptions about the coffee. I read that Kawaguchi is a playwright and there is evidence of this in the text. The ‘clang dongs’ at times felt like stage directions and you can totally imagine scene changes and settings.
Full to the brim
Every character had a back story and fitted together so beautifully with the other characters in the book. Yet there were only 213 pages. I read this hot off the heels of My Sister the Serial Killer which too packed an almighty punch with very few words. A lot happens without you ever feel like you are wading through treacle. Brevity is a style I’m finding I really like.
I won’t spoil the book for you by revealing what happens to who. I will say though that the emotional content is high and Kawaguchi twists the traveling back in time to perfect effect. You initially question the point of the time travelling, but each return was meaningful and life changing. Such is the strength of the text that you never query the fact there is a ghost or a special seat that can take you back in time. Instead you read page after beautiful page and fall in love with it. Until it’s all been devoured and you’re left bereft. If you’re struggling with your reading at the moment it’s a beautiful one to dip in to. Short, un-taxing yet meaningful. There is also a follow on, Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the Cafe which I for one will be buying. Now where’s that kettle?