Genre: Magical Realism, Japanese Literature
Goodreads Blurb:
What would you change if you could go back in time?
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 . . .
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
RATING: 4/5 STARS
The blurb of the novel is quite accurate so I will not get too much into details. Toshikazu’s book explores this age-old question in a moving magical realism story of four different characters travelling back in time from the basement of a special café in a busy neighborhood in Tokyo.
It’s so beautifully written, especially for a theme so overdone. The characters have their individual existence yet perfectly complement each other as their stories are interwoven together.
The book is written in simple language yet you’d fall in love with it from the first page due to its veracity and the themes it touches within such as the effect of Alzheimer’s disease in marital and family life and how to handle a loss of a loved one. It left me overwhelmed and I became connected to their pain and suffering as the story evolved.
It’s a tender, sensitive novel, and is less about time travelling than it is a more character-driven story. It’s about feelings, about people like you and me, about love and regret and sorrow caused by missing the opportunity to unburden your soul and leaving things unsaid.
I read this last year, but after I received this beautiful paperback copy from Dreamology I had go skim through my favourite parts again. My only complaint with this book is that it lacked depth. I wanted more. Maybe that’s a good thing. I’d suggest this to anyone for a light and heartwarming read.
“With the coffee in front of her, she closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply. It was her moment of happiness.”
Mist Ghost 