Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Book Review

Title: Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Genre: Contemporary/Sci-Fi/Translated

Rating: *****

Review: All I knew about Before the Coffee Gets Cold before I went into it was it featured a time travelling café but with some interesting restrictions and I have been trying to read more translated books recently and this seemed like a good place to start. From what I can gather the novel is going to be following for different customers of the café which is referenced by its four parts: The Lovers, Husband and Wife, The Sisters and Mother and Child. I think I will discuss each part separately and the wrap the review up with my thoughts on the book as a whole and whether I will be continuing to the other books in this series.

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The Lovers introduces us to Fumiko Kiyokawa and Goro Katada, a couple who break up as he is going to America for a job. This wouldn’t seem like too big of a deal until we learn that Fumiko is extremely work focused herself and I felt was most likely neglectful of Goro during their relationship. However, a week after she returns to this mysterious café which is part of an urban legend. The legend claims that the café allows people to travel back in time and Fumiko wants to travel back to the previous week in order to fix things with Goro. We also meet a regular at the café, Yaeko Hirai and the waitress, Kazu Tokita. Through these two we learn the rules of the time travel element, the first is that nothing you do in the past can affect the present, this means that if Fumiko travels back to the previous week it wouldn’t fix her relationship as Goro is already in America. The two other rules we learn is that there is only a single chair in the café that allows you to time travel and it has a time limit but Fumiko seems dead set on doing it anyway. Fumiko soon learns that there are a few conditions she needs to meet before going back in the past, the first is waiting for the ghost who occupies the seat to leave it so that she can use it which takes quite a while. During this time Fumiko reminisces on her relationship with Goro and how they ended up where they are. It seems that Goro’s dream was always to work at a family members game development company in America which required him to have not only 5 years’ experience but a developed version of his own game. This opportunity finally came around which led to the breakup but we don’t know why since Fumiko didn’t seem opposed to him going. When she finally gets her turn in the seat, Kazu explains the final most important rule, she will travel once the coffee is poured and she needs to drink the whole cup before it goes cold otherwise, she will be turned into a ghost just like the one she saw earlier. Fumiko travels back into the past where she asks Goro why he didn’t discuss the job offer with her as that is what she is angry about and he confesses that he thought she didn’t want to be with a guy like him due to his facial scars and would eventually start looking for better looking men which Fumiko rebuffs and he asks her to wait three years and then he will return. At this point Fumiko returns to the present where nothing has changed as she was warned but she now has the hope that Goro will return in three years and they can be together again. During this story we are introduced to some more interesting characters which I hope will be developed on in the other stories.

Husband and Wife briefly introduces us to some more side characters such as the wife of Kazu’s cousin; Kei Tokita and the sister of Yaeko, Kumi Hirai, but this story is focusing on the man called Fusagi and his wife, Kohtake. We have seen Fusagi and Kohtake popping up in the previous story but it didn’t seem like they knew each other at all let alone be married to each other. We soon learn that Fusagi wants to go back in time to give his wife a letter that he never got the chance to give her before. One day, Kohtake comes into the café to collect Fusagi and he doesn’t recognise her at all, it is at this point we learn that the pair are married and that Fusagi has early onset Alzheimer’s disease and he has finally forgotten his own life which is devasting for her even though she has tried to prepare as she is a nurse. She is determined to stay with him even if it is only as his nurse and not as his wife but this has taken a toll on her emotionally. As she is discussing this with Kei and Kazu, the ghostly woman leaves the chair and Kohtake decides to travel back in time to where her husband remembers her to see if he will give her this letter. Kohtake is obviously familiar with the café and its rules and goes straight back but her husband recognises that she is from the future where she confesses that she knows about his illness and he asks if he has forgotten her and she doesn’t know how to reply. She makes the decision here to lie to him and tell him that he gets better at which point he hands over the letter and she has to drink the coffee before her time runs out but just before she leaves Fusagi thanks her and we can assume he knew she was lying. The letter returns to the present with her and she learns that Fusagi wants her to leave him if he can’t be her husband as he doesn’t want her to just be his nurse. However, she realises in this moment he hasn’t truly forgotten her as the travel journal he carries around with him is marked full of places they have gone together and she realises that even though he might have forgotten her name and face a part of him still remembers her and that is what she is holding on to as she rushes home to be with him. Honestly, the story damn near broke my heart and I am only halfway through.

The Sisters I think is going to follow Yaeko and Kumi Hirai as we have already learnt a lot about them, so far, we know that Yaeko was disowned by her parents thirteen years ago but we don’t know why and her sister was forced to take over running the family inn which is something she has resented Yaeko. Early in the novel, Kumi delivered a letter to the café for her sister but she doesn’t read it claiming to know what it is going to say but Kumi claims their parents aren’t angry with her anymore and that she can return home but Yaeko doesn’t believe this. We learn that shortly after Kumi made her last visit to the café to try and convince her sister to return home she was involved in a car accident and died which her parents blamed her for. Upon returning to the café after the funeral Yaeko wants to go back to that day so she can see and speak to her sister once more and the others agree to send her back but this time, they send her back with an alarm to let her know when the coffee is going cold as people who visit the dead are often overwhelmed by their emotions and forgot about the coffee which is the case with the resident ghost. Yaeko goes back and sees her sister where her sister explains that she never resented Yaeko for leaving but it meant she couldn’t fulfil her dream of running the family inn together and she promises her sister that she will return to the inn even though Yaeko knows when her sister leaves, she is going to die. When Kumi briefly goes to the toilet the alarm starts going off but Yaeko wants to see her sister one last time which means she wouldn’t be able to return. Kei manages to get her to drink the coffee returning her home and covers for her when her sister is sad that Yaeko has left. Back in the present, Yaeko decides to return to the family inn with the letter Kumi wrote for her the day she died, the only that Kei never threw away and keep her promise to her sister even if her sister isn’t there anymore. We also get an introduction to a young girl from the future in this story who came back specifically to take a picture with Kei. We know two major things about Kei, she has a heart condition and that she is currently pregnant and I have feeling that the final story, Mother and Child is going to be about them.

Mother and Child is the story of Kei and her child. It turns out because of her weak heart the chances of both Kei and the child surviving the birth are very low. Kei’s husband doesn’t want her to go through with the pregnancy not because he doesn’t want the baby but he could never decided between her and the child or imagine losing either of them. Kei decides to keep the baby but also wants to see if she can travel into the future to meet her child as she might never get the chance. The others allow this knowing it might be the only chance for Kei to speak to her child before her death and send her 10 years into the future where the café is now being run by someone else. For a moment, Kei is disappointed and upset but her husband phones the café in the future and explains the young girl working there is their daughter. She learns that her daughter’s name is Miki and for a minute it seems like the young girl doesn’t want to talk to her mother until Fumiko arrives. Fumiko explains to Miki that her mother doesn’t have long and she confesses that she didn’t know what to say to her now she had arrived but Kei knows this is the same girl that come to the past in order to take a picture with her as she most likely didn’t have any photos of them together as she would have died in childbirth or shortly after. As Kei and Miki speak, Kei is able to realise that her daughter has grown up happy and healthy and even though there are times when she is sad, she is proud of the fact that Kei chose to bring her into the world and this moment almost brought me to tears. By the time, Kei returns to the present she is a sobbing mess but soon finds out that she is indeed carrying a little girl and now knows the name she will give her forging and even stronger bond between mother and baby even though they will never truly be together.

Overall, Before the Coffee Gets Cold shattered my heart and almost made me cry more than once reading it. While I loved all of the stories presented in the novel and how they all subtly tied together my favourite and the one that hit me the hardest would have to be Mother and Child considering the emotional impact it would have had on Kei, knowing that she wasn’t only going to die but that she would never be able to forge proper memories with her daughter and all she had were those few minutes in the future together. I will definitely be reading the other books in this series and checking out any other works from the author. 5 out 5 stars, highly recommended especially since it is a very quick read.

Buy it here:

Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com

Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com