CEO Reads: Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Looking for a short novel to reignite your love of reading?  Then Kawaguchi’s novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold could be just the thing. 

Toshikazu Kawaguchi (著), was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1971. He formerly produced, directed and wrote for the theatrical group Sonic Snail. The novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold is adapted from a play by Kawaguchi, which won the 10th Suginami Drama Festival grand prize. In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

This beautiful, simple tale tells the story of people who must face up to their past, in order to move on with their lives. In Kawaguchi’s café we meet a series of customers who want to go back in time for one last time to meet someone they miss, they love or in one case have never met yet. This is a hopeful  moving story that starts out haltingly and then just pulls you in. The scenes only play out in the café which makes more sense to me now that I know that Kawaguchi writes plays. Through each customer’s story we learn more about the strange opportunity offered – you can go back in the past and speak to that person but only until the coffee gets cold.  And there is a serious limitation as nothing you do can change the present. So why go back?

Well each of these customers, a women who lost her fiancé, a husband suffering from advancing dementia, the bar owner across the way and a girl seeking her mother are all seeking something and think going back to a past moment might help. There is also a ghost, a woman in a white dress and we learn a bit more about her as the book goes on.

Each chapter is like an Act in a play and as the story meanders on we learn more about the building itself which has been in place since the Edo period, the owner, the women who work there. I was willing to write of this read as a bit twee but it has had me thinking about each character, the nature of time, and attitudes for the future ever since.

Each chapter of the book cuts deeper and hits harder than the last, until the final tugs effortlessly at your emotions.

This is a book that will surprise you, subverts your expectations and will leave you thinking long after you finish it. This was given to me by a friend – yes one of those recommendations where you kind of dread being asked if you have read it yet. I am glad I did read it and goes to show we should always challenge our reading habits and we just might be surprised.

There is a follow up Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the café  which brings us more stories from the café customers. 

Geoffrey Trousselot (Translator)