Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Image credit: thebooktoldmethat.wordpress.com

Time travel is always an engaging thing to read about, or watch, or listen to because there are so many ways in which you can interpret how past actions will affect future events. It’s a theme that has been explored time and time and time again from Marty’s humorous hijinks in the Back to the Future trilogy to Stephen Fry’s theorising what would happen if Hitler had never been born in Making History. It’s been questioned and scrutinised over by comedians on Loading Ready Run’s The Panalysts and Hermione Granger in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. And now a new name comes into the discussion of time travel: Toshikazu Kawaguchi, writer of the Japanese bestseller that I have just closed the cover on: Before the Coffee Gets Cold.

There is a little basement café in an alley in Tokyo where customers can come, have a cup of coffee, and travel through time. But there are rules ones has to stick to when going on this journey: they must stay seated in one particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold. With such rules to follow, is it worth it? For four customers the answer is yes. One wants to see the love that left her, one wishes to receive a letter from her husband before he forgets her, one must see her sister one last time, and one desires to meet the daughter she never gets the chance to know.

A simple story, written in a very accessible tone, Before the Coffee Gets Cold reminded me a little bit of The Boy In Striped Pyjamas. It’s very a simply written book, yet it’s dealing with some very mature and emotionally deep themes, which makes it doubly easy to plough through because the writing is unchallenging and the stories are so compelling.

At its core, the book explores the effect that time travel, both the idea, interpretation, and actual experience, has the ability to change the perceptions and attitudes of the time traveler. While the café staff are quick to explain that nothing in the present will change, no matter how hard one tries, each character that travels through time in this book comes back emotionally altered and in a subtle way, the course of their future is redirected… or not (this is an argument that could take some time).

Image credit: livreshebdo.fr

It's also an exploration into the mental and emotional nature of the human, the malleability and fragility that is our chemical facilities. Driven by emotion, all four characters who travel through time make the snap decision to do so and often, the outcome is that they are forced to process the absurdity of the situation as well as the relived encounter in less than ten minutes. The common recurrence being that, two thirds of the way through the experience, the meaning, change, and purpose of that snap decision falls into place and a moment of clarity is reached with a sip of alarmingly lukewarm coffee.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a very sweet little book, refreshingly original, clever, simple, and elegant. Definitely worth the afternoon read.

Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi, 2015

Published: Originally published as Coffee Ga Samenai Uchini by Sunmark Publishing Inc, Tokyo Japan. Translated and published by Picador, London, 2019.