Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Four interlinked stories in a small Tokyo cafe where time travel is possible if you follow the rules…

Before the Coffee Gets Cold is an interesting book about an underground café. Funiculi Funicula is a small windowless basement cafe in a quiet side street, patronised by a small but loyal group of Tokyo locals. Aside from the cafe’s carefully-brewed coffee, it also offers an unusual service, which allows its customers to travel back in time or forward in time, under certain strict rules.

If you don’t follow this rule, you will get stuck in the past. Most people look back at these rules. However, some people turn to the past by accepting these. Now, that particular chair is always occupied by the ghost of a woman in a dress who is always reading a book. The only way to get into that chair is if she gets up and go to the bathroom, so the best way to get that happen is to keep her coffee cup filled. Apparently, the ghost drinks the coffee and eventually she gets up from the seat to go to the bathroom. This is the only time when the seat is empty. At this point, the person who wants to travel the time dash into the seat before the ghost comes back from bathroom.

“At the end of the day, whether one returns to the past or travels to the future, the present does not change. So it raises the question: just what is the point of that chair?”

This beguiling little book explores the personal opportunities of time travel, amongst a small group of workers and customers at this backstreet Tokyo cafe. The book is arranged with 4 such stories. Each story focuses on love as it exists within different types of human relationships: lovers facing separation due to career opportunities; a married couple dealing with the husband’s worsening dementia; estranged sisters trying to balance their own dreams with family expectations; and a woman in the early stages of pregnancy imagining her future child.

Even if you cannot change the outcome, you can learn what led up to that event. However, even if you visit someone who has passed, or even if you go to visit your husband before he is taken by Alzheimer’s, you still might find inner peace in unexpected ways. Though you cannot change the present or future, travelling back or forward to the time allows you to read a letter that never arrived or was delivered, change the course of a prior conversation to better understand a person’s thoughts or motives, find a way to bridge a chasm, meet a child that you did not live to raise, or come back to see a mother who died giving you birth.

“She wanted to do things without having to worry what others thought.
She simply lived for her freedom.”

My impressions of the book varied over the course of reading it. Of the four parts, I found the first part the least engaging and the central character rather bland. Especially the beginning, where too many characters were introduced, building of the backdrop simultaneously and establishing relationships between the characters, made it a little exhausting and confusing to read. things began to make sense as the story progressed. The latter parts of the book provided some insight and pathos, which I appreciated and made reading Before the Coffee Gets Cold worthwhile .

I haven’t read a lot of Japanese fiction in translation, and perhaps it is as a result of cultural differences, or of the book’s origins as a play script, but it felt like the prose and plotting lacked nuance in parts. In translated fiction, it can be hard to judge how much of the problems are the result of mistranslation and how much are the result of the original, but I certainly felt like the writing let the story down. I was also left feeling confused that the role and importance of the “ghost” woman dressed in white, who acts as a sort of gatekeeper to the special chair, was never explained.

“It takes courage to say what has to be said.”

Being such a closed room story, which takes place entirely within the space of one environment, also made the story feel very closed in. There’s no room to breath between stories, no world to explore – and while on some level I liked this, I feel like the author doesn’t give us a broad enough overview of what the cafe looks like, and the atmosphere it permeates, to really be drawn into this environment. Intriguing idea, with some interesting moral and social viewpoints explored, but this just missed the spot for me emotionally.

Whilst I appreciated the takeaway from this novel that re-evaluating a situation, changing one’s attitude and making peace with the past can go just as far as actually changing events, I did feel that it needed to be made far more overt. The concept that sitting in a specific chair can be the vehicle needed to encourage a change of heart is original and clever. Overall, a really interesting premise, with some delightful and poignant moments of insight into the complexities of human relationships.