Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Score: 3/5 Bookmarks

I read Before the Coffee Gets Cold, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, as part of a buddy read a few months ago, and while my fellow readers really enjoyed it, I just never warmed to it. While I liked the idea of the story quite a lot I didn’t enjoy the writing. Initially I thought it was because I had just finished reading The Poet X, which is lyrical and almost more of an experience than a book, and Kawaguchi’s writing style is very straight forward and matter-of-fact with no embellishment at all. But I put it down and came back to it several books later and still felt the same way.

Of course, this book has also been translated into English, and given that I stopped taking Japanese lessons when I was seven I couldn’t really tell you if it’s an accurate representation of the author’s meaning or not.

I found I wanted more details about the characters, their stories, their relationships. I was intrigued by them, but then never felt like I quite got enough information to really get invested. The way they were portrayed felt almost like non-fiction descriptions rather than a novel, if that makes any sense.

Anyway, I’ve also got the second book Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the Café so I’ll let you know how that one goes.

Synopsis:

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-traveling 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?