Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi Review

Who wouldn’t want to time travel? Well, you probably wouldn’t if you had to follow these very precise, arbitrary and convoluted rules - yes, even more so than the usual! So the characters in this story can time travel but only to the relatively recent past and they have to sit in a specific seat at a specific table - which they can’t leave once they time travel, which means they can’t leave the cafe - and only for the duration it takes for a coffee to cool, after which you have to drink it down or else risk turning into a ghost forever burdened to haunt the cafe. Also nothing you do in the past can alter the present/future. Yay, so much whimsical fun…

I loathed Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold. It is amongst the sappiest drivel I’ve ever had the displeasure to read. It’s basically four short stories that happen to share the same setting and plot device. A businesswoman wants a second chance to tell her boyfriend that she loves him; a wife wants to talk to her husband about a letter he wrote pre-Alzheimer’s; a woman wants to see her kid sister again before a car accident takes her life; and, in a shocking turn of events, a woman wants to meet her unborn child in the future, which is apparently possible because why not, this is all contrived garbage anyway.

It is so, so sickeningly sentimental, it’s almost unbearable. Every storyline is designed to hit you in the “feels” except Kawaguchi’s prose is so weak and inept, and his characters so shallow and unemotional, that each fails one after the other. Look, I have a heart ok - it’s in a jar in a wardrobe somewhere - but even if I was wearing it I’d still find the storylines about as moving as a rock with half the emotion.

The characters - Kei, Kazu, Nagare - all seemed like the same person and were basically interchangeable because their personalities were that indistinct and irrelevant. The Alzheimer’s storyline felt especially pointless - the wife wants to talk to her husband about the letter he wrote, that was handed to her in the present, that she refused to read, but she wants him to tell her about it in the past? Just read it in the present! And the future storyline - what, she just “knows” that she’s going to die in childbirth? Gimme a break.

Unless you want to read the equivalent of a novel-length Hallmark greeting card, spare yourself the tedium and don’t bother with Before the Coffee Gets Cold. If you want emotion, slam your finger in a door - you’ll feel more and it’s quicker than reading this rubbish.