Man holding book. Thomas Hardy/The Olaf Messenger
This week I am reviewing the beautifully written book “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. This book takes place in a back-alley café in Tokyo. This café is unlike all others, for it has an odd power: time travel. In this book, we meet four visitors who utilize the café’s ability to travel back in time. The book is organized very succinctly, each chapter acts like a short novella about a visitor and their experience with the café and its powers. Sometimes characters from other stories bleed into one another, creating the small and intimate world that characterizes this book. But time travel is not easy. If it were, the café would be crowded all the time! Instead, every visitor that wishes to time travel must follow a series of obscure rules in order to travel forwards or backwards. One of these rules is that you must return before the coffee gets cold.
One of the things that makes this book so beautiful and emotional is that every visitor has a different reason for traveling. Additionally, each traveler’s reason is more gut-wrenching than the last. The book covers themes of dealing with dementia, death, familial responsibility, and unspoken feelings. The book is extremely short, coming in at 213 pages. At first, this seems surprising. However, it makes sense, given the book’s original format. Kawaguchi is a playwright by day and a novelist by night. “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” was originally a Japanese play that was adapted and translated into a novel. I believe this gives the book another layer of emotion. Once you read it, you’ll know what I mean. It feels like you are in the café as well, watching these characters go through unimaginable hardships. It is very clear to see how the small cast of characters orbit around the same café and each other. Opening oneself up to such vulnerability in a public café is a striking theme for a play or a book, but Kawaguchi uses the setting and his characters in such a way that builds community and creates a kind of closure for each visitor.
Overall, Kawaguchi asks the reader an age-old question that is full of raw imagination and emotion: what would you change if you could go back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet for maybe the last time? So, whether you need a good cry or a wholesome book to give you faith in humanity, I strongly recommend “Before the Coffee Gets Cold.” If you enjoyed the book, there’s more! There are four books in the series, giving readers plenty to explore within Kawaguchi’s world of the magic café.
Paige Ewert is from Minneapolis, Minn. Her majors are art history and history.