[Review] Before the Coffee Gets Cold - Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Title of Book: Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Series: Before the Coffee Gets Cold #1
Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Translator: Geoffrey Trousselot
Publisher: Picador
Publication Year: 2019
Language: English
Format: Paperback
Pages: 213

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?

-----------------------

Before the Coffee Gets Cold revolves around a small café named Funiculi Funicula which located in Tokyo. What makes this café special is there is an urban legend surrounding the café that people could time travel if they sit in a specific seat in the café. However, there are a set of rules that have to be followed to travel in time. For example, each person could only time travel once, whatever they do while time travel won't change the present, and they could only time travel within a time limit, which is before the coffee served gets cold.

This book contains four short stories. Although it's structured like a collection of short stories, there's a continuity in the characters involved. What change is the focus in each story. I think it's possible to read a story and not reading another but there are references to what happened in the previous one. So maybe it would be more proper to call it four chapters. This book has several main characters which consist of Nagare, Kei, and Kazu who work at the café. There are also recurring characters which consist of several regular visitors of the café such as Fumiko, Kohtake, and Hirai.

As I mentioned before, the café in this book has many rules for time travel and I only mentioned some of them. A rule that I want to point out is that whatever they do while time travelling, the present won't change. This raises a big question. Since most of the time when people are asked if they could travel back in time what they'd do, they would answer with doing things differently or changing things they regret in the present time. If whatever we did while time travel wouldn't change the present, what's the point of time travel then? Especially considering the rules and consequence if you're not following the rules in the café, is it worth the trouble?

Through the stories in this book, Kawaguchi tries to answer this question from several perspectives and situations. The characters in the stories tried to deal with regrets and griefs then turning them into hope. My take is although there are things that cannot be changed because it is out of our control, we can still control ourselves, our views and attitudes towards them. Sure, whatever happened in the past cannot be changed but how we process those experiences will determine our attitude to face the future and that's the most important thing. Essentially, these characters time travel to help them process their regrets and griefs.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold has been adapted into a movie in 2018. Based on what I read, I'm looking forward to watch the movie as well. Overall, this book is such a heartwarming and touching read. Especially the last two chapters. Before the Coffee Gets Cold is the first book in a series. As far as I know only two have been translated into English. I recommend to read this book and I will definitely pick up the next book.