Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi: Allegory About Making Peace With Oneself

The setup is simple: a cafe that has magical powers to take people back in time. But whatever you do in the past won't change your present. So what good is it? 'Before the Coffee Gets Cold' explores such a conundrum. The best-selling novel from Japan, written by Toshikazu Kawaguchi and translated to English by Geoffrey Trousselot, has many elements similar to Matt Haig's bestselling novel 'The Midnight Library'. Both books are about making peace with the past. Both involve time travel to the past, the only difference being in the scale of it. One can go infinity times in the latter, but only once in this one. 

The book contains four parts, or extended chapters, with a sitcom-style setup. Each one has an individual story line that also ties in with the larger plot. In each part, a person goes back into time and tries to revisit their past. Even though the present never changes, the person changes due to a perspective change during their visit. The catch are a few rules that are so restrictive that it makes the process too cumbersome to bother with. The main one is that one has to get back before the coffee served to them gets cold. If not, they become ghosts, like the one mysterious ghost woman in the story. 

When I started reading it, I was initially turned off by the overtly visual style of narration, which I don't normally like. But there was a notable variation in this book. Its style was more pronounced. Every depiction of actions by characters has an exaggerated quality that reminded me of 'Throne of Blood', an Akira Kurosawa movie inspired by Shakespeare's 'Macbeth'. While watching it, I felt the same way and later realized the movie based its narration on the Noh dramas of Japan. Then I came to know that the book was initially written as a play, and that explained my discomfort. Now with this contextual knowledge, I was able to enjoy the book better. 

My main complaint about the book is the negligible character development. None of them have an iota of personality to speak of. But the narration style of a theatrical production covered most of this issue. Though it made it difficult to connect with the characters, especially when they are on their emotional heights, their exaggerated acts make them distinguishable. The plot is also highly uneven. The motives don't have much clarity, and resolutions are sometimes abrupt and refuse to engage the reader's emotions. Still, the novel is fairly interesting and readable for its message and narrative style. 

*From here on, there are some spoilers.* 

The book is essentially an allegory about how people choose to live in their pasts, refusing to move forward, like the ghost in the story who lost track of time. In the first chapter, we find Fumiko becoming a metaphorical ghost when she hears that her lover is leaving her to go to the US. We see her drinking her coffee and realizing it has turned cold. She has become tied to her past and cannot see a way forward. It's when she revisits her past and hears fully what her lover has to say that she gets back to being a living being. If you see closely, the same is the case in the first three chapters. 

In the final chapter, we find a twist. Kei decides to travel to her future. Kei has become a ghost not because of her past life but due to her anxiety about the future. To come out of it, she has to go to the future and make peace. One cannot change the present by going back to the past or forward to the future, but one can always find relief by making peace with it and returning to the present before their coffee gets cold and permanently burying them in the rubbles of the past or future.

I feel that the ghost is a very interesting character. In the first chapter, she's reading a novel titled 'The Lovers', incidentally the name of the chapter. It's never mentioned which novels she is reading in the next chapters. If we presume that she's reading books with the respective chapter names in the next chapters, it's easy to guess who she is. 

Who else is reading 'The Lovers' with her? The readers themselves, who have also somewhere in the past or present left the coffee cold and become metaphorical ghosts.

PS: There's a Japanese movie version of the book called Cafe Funiculi Funicula. They made it into a screwball comedy and changed the plot a lot. I couldn't watch that shipwreck of a movie.