Why "Before the Coffee gets cold" is as wondrous as it sounds

Equipped with an uncanny sense of serenity and silence, this is the kind of book that tugs at your heartstrings and makes you submit to the unconditionality of love. It doesn’t have a “and then they lived happily ever after” ending, but the sheer hopefulness and warmth that it concludes with, makes you have that ‘feel-good’ gut feeling.

Time is such a precious commodity. Fluid as it is, they say “Time and tide wait for none”. I remember coming across a wailing widow a few years ago, who was crying ceaselessly over her husband’s demise while being consoled by the well-wishers. She kept saying this one thing, “Can I meet him once again? I do not want anything more…just one chance to meet him?” The people around her had clicked their tongues sadly and labelled that request to be a wild fancy.

But what if we could really do that? What if we could travel back and forth in time and meet our beloved ones? Would it really pacify our distressed soul?

In a vintage café located in Japan, there lurks an urban legend-- it allows you to go back the steps of time. But you have to come back to the present….before the coffee gets cold. The time-travel privilege comes with a catch. There are many rules that the customers have to abide by, or else they get lost in the cycle of time, turning into an emotionless ghost. The customers have to sit on a particular chair, they can only meet people who’ve been to the café previously and they cannot get up from their seat for the entire duration of their reverie. And the most frightening of them all: they have to return to the present before the coffee placed in front of them hasn’t turned cold.

By adding these strange regulations, the author seems to tone down the bizarreness of the idea to infiltrate the dense fabric of time. The café isn’t all powerful, thus it intelligently imposes restrictions so as to fix the duration in which you can experience the unimaginable luxury of time travel. But no matter what you do to the past in the course of your travel, the present will remain unchanged. Whatever alterations you make to the past, whoever you kill or whoever you save—by some magical force, everything is somehow rectified. Each piece falls back into place and the Present just flicks off your frail attempt to change its wayward course. 

“Before the Coffee gets cold” by Toshikazu Kawaguchi is no exception to the exquisiteness and meticulousness that is associated with Japanese literature. The backdrop of the story is pure science fiction, but still, I would largely put this into the ‘family drama’ genre just because it has managed to portray such colourful shades of familial affairs. The story is broken up into four parts—and it showcases the time travel experience of four different characters. All the individual sub-plots are interwoven, and so the novel falls nothing short of a wholesome heart-wrenching account of letting go and remembrance.  

The story starts off with a young couple parting ways. The gentleman leaves for America, leaving his fiancé Fumiko back in town. A week after the departure, Fumiko rushes to the café and expresses her desire to go back in time. She knows that she won’t be able to bring back her partner, but she lives with the guilt that she had never asked her partner not to go…and she wishes to see what happens if she puts forward her forbiddance. Even though Fumiko is not able to stop him from going abroad, she returns to the present with information that soothes her throbbing conscience. 

The author goes about weaving his second tale with much more care. Fusagi is inflicted with Alzheimer’s, and his memories keep on vaporizing—to an extent that he forgets about his wife Kohtake, whom he had dearly loved. Fusagi comes to the café everyday, stays rooted to his fixed seat, flipping through travel magazines, until one day he reveals an enveloped letter which he wishes to give to his wife. Upon understanding that she will never be able to know its contents just because her entity as Fusagi’s wife had sublimed as effortlessly as his memories, Kohtake travels to a time when Fusagi was moderately healthy. The trip back in time and the revelations that dawn upon her—paint a kaleidoscopic picture of forgiveness and letting go—which almost engulfs us like a cozy blanket on a wintry night.

The next two tales—which talk about a woman going back in time to mend her relationship with her dead sister, and a mother travelling to the future to meet her unborn child—sort of ties the whole novel together. The contrast between relationships; ranging from what exists between a husband and wife, to what exists between two sisters, culminating with the mother-child bond; has been shown in the light of acceptance and individuality. The whole novel gets forward not through mind-boggling visual descriptions, but through crisp and endearing dialogues.The prose is heavy with verbal exchanges which successfully manage to expose the characters bit by bit, and not in bulk. Much care has been given to sketch their backdrops, and this constructs the landscape in which the readers place the characters based on what they perceive of them. One downside that caught my eye was that the female characters lacked originality. Though efforts has been made to differentiate them based on their background and their social spaces, that contrast seemed to die out as the novel progressed. There is nothing very notably different in between the career-driven Fumiko, the affectionate Kohtake and the arrogant Hirai in terms of their personality. This issue, however, gets less of an importance when it comes to the male characters—but that doesn’t add or deduct anything visible from the story, just because the novel focuses more on the persona of women. 

The book also comes about as an astonishing work of intricacy, since it attempts to throw light upon the fact that it is women who are more emotion or instinct driven. The male characters, according to me, have been purposefully subdued in order to explore their characterizations solely from the perspectives of their female counterparts. The tone and essence of ‘regret’ has been brushed quite skillfully in every corner of the book’s storyline, which doesn’t let the story get stripped out of its staunch familiarity. 

The pace of the book carries a balance, it progresses with a smooth agility, halting here and there and then again picking up momentum, achieving a layer by layer plot build-up. Most intriguingly, the individual time travel experiences of the four characters is nothing groundbreaking, nor are the situations in which they find themselves in. But even then, there is a sort of compassion lingering in every nook. The characters do not appear to be unrealistic or special—rather, it is their staunch ordinariness that makes their tales more appealing. The author has clothed each them with much sympathy—consequently to which, their flaws never surface to be unprecedented and dismissive. He has also tried to tug at the fact that regrets originate from the realization that something that should’ve been done was not done---but if we are given an opportunity to go back and do that thing, will our regrets vanish? The present won’t change, the people who’ve left us won’t magically emerge back; but still, why do the customers keep flocking back to the dingy café, sit in that one chair and worry whether their coffee is warm enough? 

This unique aftertaste of the book is the cherry on top of the cake. Going back and forth through time, acknowledging facts that were yet hidden and seeing things were not meant to be seen—will it solve our thirst to unravel the unknown?  

➦Want to grab a copy? Check out the book here!

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