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A review by simoneandherbooks
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
5.0
This was such a delightful little read filled with heartwarming stories of people who travel through time in a small cafe in the middle of Japan. First off, I love the premise. It's this little unassuming cafe that does everything else a cafe does: serve drinks and food and shares a warm place to get work done, read the newspaper or book, and converse with friends. But this particular cafe came into popularity because of one small ability: you can travel through time.
There's plenty of rules around time traveling in this cafe:
1. You can only travel in one particular seat in the cafe (that's constantly occupied by the ghost of a woman reading)
2. You can only visit people who have been to the cafe and it must be within the cafe
3. You can never leave the seat once you've traveled otherwise you will immediately return to the present
4. You cannot change the present. If you go to change something in the past, that's fine, but it won't change the outcome of the present
5. You have until your coffee gets cold to be there
With these rules, I didn't understand what these travelers would get from such a limited trip, but the stories you read of these travelers makes you realize how something so simple as a moment in time can mean to someone. I loved how simple these stories were and how elegantly the author lays them out. There's an interconnection here that's undeniable and I loved that he's able to connect all these stories and people together in a beautiful way.
The story is broken up into four vignettes, each threading between each other, but very barely. You learn more about the frequent visitors of the cafe but also the employees and owner. I loved learning about the individual lives of each person who walks through those doors and they were all so varied. Some were workaholics, others trying to escape an inheritance they don't want. Others are expectant mothers and wives missing their husbands. Even though the stories were all speculative fiction, it felt literary in its deep character-driven development and it really made me feel a lot for each character.
I think the best lesson I learned from this book is that a single moment in time is all you need to make the lasting impact on your life. As we already established, these travelers couldn't change anything about what they were visiting, but something does change and you see that when they return. And I loved that.
There's plenty of rules around time traveling in this cafe:
1. You can only travel in one particular seat in the cafe (that's constantly occupied by the ghost of a woman reading)
2. You can only visit people who have been to the cafe and it must be within the cafe
3. You can never leave the seat once you've traveled otherwise you will immediately return to the present
4. You cannot change the present. If you go to change something in the past, that's fine, but it won't change the outcome of the present
5. You have until your coffee gets cold to be there
With these rules, I didn't understand what these travelers would get from such a limited trip, but the stories you read of these travelers makes you realize how something so simple as a moment in time can mean to someone. I loved how simple these stories were and how elegantly the author lays them out. There's an interconnection here that's undeniable and I loved that he's able to connect all these stories and people together in a beautiful way.
The story is broken up into four vignettes, each threading between each other, but very barely. You learn more about the frequent visitors of the cafe but also the employees and owner. I loved learning about the individual lives of each person who walks through those doors and they were all so varied. Some were workaholics, others trying to escape an inheritance they don't want. Others are expectant mothers and wives missing their husbands. Even though the stories were all speculative fiction, it felt literary in its deep character-driven development and it really made me feel a lot for each character.
I think the best lesson I learned from this book is that a single moment in time is all you need to make the lasting impact on your life. As we already established, these travelers couldn't change anything about what they were visiting, but something does change and you see that when they return. And I loved that.