Rating: 2/5
Spoiler Alert! You can't travel back in time to stop yourself from reading spoilers, so don't read on if you don't want to know the ending.
Set in a coffee shop in the backstreets of Tokyo, Before the coffee gets cold is a meeting of folk tale and sci fi as it tells the story of four people who choose to revisit their own past. Toshikazu Kawaguchi tells the story of a cafe that holds the secret of time travel - but, as always, there are a couple of conditions to contend with.
The conditions, in fact, are quite constricting. The novel's title comes from the fact that when you travel back (I should probably say if, there are a lot of rules before you even get to go back), you can only stay as long as your coffee is warm. If you don't finish the coffee before it goes cold, you'll be trapped in the past and become a ghost-like figure forever trapped in the cafe.
I don't know about you, but I feel like my coffee normally goes cold in like 20 minutes, tops. That's not a lot of time.
However, the rules about time travel weren't a problem for me. Sure, I think it's hard to have a meaningful conversation worth travelling through time for in the amount of time if takes for coffee to go cold, but generally I think the rules were no less strange or arbitrary than time travel rules usually are.
The main reason for my rating was simply that I didn't connect with any of the characters.
The novel is split into four stories, each one focusing on a different person who wants to travel through time. It's a very small cast, with most of the characters already knowing each other from the beginning. It was an interesting range of characters, and I enjoyed learning more about the staff at the cafe throughout the novel, but I never connected with them. There wasn't enough time to really show why I should care about any of them, other than that they were nice people on the surface.
Whilst this was recommended by a friend who loved it, I couldn't bring myself to feel too much about it. It was sad, certainly, and there were parts that touched me. But I can't say more than that. I cared because it was a natural human feeling, I was empathetic to their stories and their losses, but I didn't care because of the characters. They were just vessels for the stories of loss we all experience.
The novel covers a break-up, a case of Alzheimers, and two deaths. It's heavy stuff. For some people, the opportunity to travel back and have a conversation with those they've lost - for whatever reason - would be revolutionary. And for the characters in Before the coffee gets cold, you can see the reason behind their choice to travel back, the motivation and the way it changes their story. It asks the big question: would you change what you're doing in the present if you had answers to the questions you were too afraid to ask?
It's a big question for such a short book. It's explored intelligently and emotionally. My rating isn't reflective of any problem with the narrative or the storytelling. I can see why people enjoy. It just wasn't the one for me.
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