Thoughts on : Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Posted by Kay on March 27, 2021 8:36 pm in 4 stars reads | 1 comment

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Genre : Fiction, Magical Realism
Series : Before the Coffee Gets Cold, book 1

About the Book  :

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-travelling 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 . . .

Before the Coffee Gets Cold very pleasantly surprised me. It’s a little book, yet in so few pages, it packs a lot of emotions and memorable moments.

I thought the structure was quite interesting. The story is told in four parts, with each one focusing on a different character (as presented in the synopsis). Because of this, it reads a little like a collection of short stories, yet it isn’t one. There are threads of story that slowly build something together, leading to one part and the next.

There was a surprising number of rules to time travel in this café, and I really enjoyed that aspect of it. Traveling to the past was easy but not without consequences, so each character had to be careful with their decision. I also really enjoyed the characters we got to meet. I empathized with all of them and thought of them for several days after.

It seems reactions to Before the Coffee Gets Cold are quite mixed, and I can see why. It’s a quiet little book where nothing much happens, and the writing (perhaps due to the translation, perhaps simply because of its style) can feel a bit stiff at times, keeping you at a certain distance from the characters. But for me, it worked really well.

There’s at least one more book in the series that has been translated to English, but while I really enjoyed this one, I’m not sure I want to read the following book. I thought the story and the concept were perfect for one little book, and I don’t feel the need to continue on. We’ll see!