Before The Coffee Gets Cold is a magical tale offering the question: would you take the chance to return to the past?
Author Toshikazu Kawaguchi is a producer, writer, and director of a Tokyo theatre group, and this began as an award winning play. An international bestseller, this has been adapted for the screen in Japan.
A small Tokyo cafe has been brewing coffee for over 100 years, and the rumours that you can travel back in time for the duration of a cup of coffee are not an urban legend. The nine seat cafe is run by a couple and their grown daughter, on friendly terms with their daily regulars - a bar hostess; a man reading travel magazines and his wife; and a woman reading a book. Fumiko has just broken up with her boyfriend and wants to go back to that moment in time to perhaps change the outcome. But there are rules: you can only meet people who have also been inside the cafe; you can only stay as long as the coffee is hot; the present won't change; you must drink all the coffee before you return; and there is only one seat in the cafe that can be used - which is always occupied by the book-reading woman, actually a ghost trapped forever in this spot when she did not follow the rules.
Over the few weeks of a Summer, Fumiko will meet her absent boyfriend again, the bar hostess will reunite with her deceased sister, and the wife of the magazine reader will go back to receive an important letter. There will even be a visit from a young girl, travelling back from the future.
These quirky events gather to form a warm and charming story where grudges are soothed, and missed opportunities open doors to a new future. Like many Japanese novels this turns quite sentimental, and while this moves from oddball fantasy to a heartwarming conclusion, it does so with ease and the conversational tone of friends reuniting.
Simple, inviting and entertaining.
Kawaguchi has written two more novels in the series: Tales From The Cafe (2017) and Before The Memory Fades (2019).
2015 / Hardcover / 272 pages
Comments