Before the coffee gets cold

by

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

A small group of 7 us met at Jay’s home on Friday, March 28th, to discuss; Before the Coffee gets Cold’ 

The book is set in a strange underground café called Funiculi Funicula in Tokyo. In this café customers can choose to travel back to the past, or even to the future.

There are however certain rules attached that must be strictly obeyed and the present cannot be changed as a result of time-travel.

The story is divided into four parts: The Lovers, Husband and Wife, The Sisters, Mother and Child. In each of these parts a different woman decides to travel back or forth in time despite the strict conditions attached.

All four women have different reasons to return to the past or future, such as regret, love, loss and hope.

The first part of the book, The Lovers, very strangely reads almost like stage directions, where everything is minutely explained, such as the colour of the clothes, positions of furniture, bags etc. This continues throughout the book, however on a lesser scale than in the first part.

This is likely because the book was initially written as a stage play.

We felt that the book eventually developed and filled out as far as the narrative was concerned.

While we felt that the first part was the one we like the least, we all very much liked the last part, Mother and Child, which we found quite touching and emotional.

Although the book started out as quite straightforward and slightly strange, it surprised us with its themes of regret, acceptance and finding peace as the stories unfolded.

We could relate to many of the issues and how we too might choose to return to certain moments in the past for various reasons.

As it is the case with many of the books which we discuss during our book group meetings, we ended up liking “Before the Coffee gets cold” more after the discussion than we initially did.

Review thanks to Marianne Khor