Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi |Translated by Geoffrey Trousselot| 224 Pages | Genre: Fiction | Publisher: Picador | Year: 2019 | My Rating: 8.5/10

” When you go back, no matter how hard you try, the present won’t change”
― Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold

The novel was originally published in Japan in 2015 and translated into English by Geoffrey Trousselot in 2019. The novel was also adapted into a film, Café Funiculi Funicula, which was released in Japan in 2018 and directed by Ayuko Tsukahara. Before the Coffee Gets Cold is an adaptation of a stage play. Kawaguchi was a playwright, and the original story was written for the theatre before being adapted into a novel. The theatrical influence remains visible throughout the book, with ‘clang-dong’ written as a scene shift as characters arrive and leave the cafe. Almost everything happens in one enclosed space where the characters enter, sit, talk, listen, and leave. The narrative is carried by dialogue. The result is a novel that sometimes feels less like conventional fiction than like a collection of intimate dramatic scenes.

The story is set in a small café in Tokyo, Funiculi Funicula, where a customer can travel into the past. There are rules, of course, as one must sit in a particular chair; one may meet only people who have visited the café; nothing said or done in the past can alter the present; and the traveller must return before the coffee becomes cold. The café is therefore less a machine for travelling through time than a chamber for confronting memory. The novel doesn’t have altered timelines, paradoxes, dystopian futures, or battles with destiny. The supernatural mechanism is deliberately narrow, where the past is sealed, and the future remains untouched. Only the traveller’s understanding of what happened can change, and time becomes another technology of human agency.

Kawaguchi is less interested in the mechanics of time travel than in its emotional residue. This novel is about the strange human wish to return to a moment in personal history, in which a conversation that ended a relationship, the apology that was never made, the goodbye that was too hurried, the person whose absence has become more real than their presence ever was. The café does not offer a second chance in the conventional sense. It offers something both smaller and, perhaps, more difficult chance to see the past without being able to repair it. The novel proposes that regret is not necessarily a desire to alter history. Sometimes regret is simply the recognition that we misunderstood history when we were living through it.

The novel’s emotional world is built from ordinary disappointments in life rather than extraordinary tragedies. The narrative follows four distinct visitors: Fumiko, who wishes to speak with the boyfriend who left her; Kohtake, a nurse seeking a letter from her Alzheimer’s-stricken husband, Fusagi; Yaeko, a bar owner mourning a final conversation with her late sister; and Kei, the café owner’s ailing wife who travels to the future to see her unborn daughter. Assisted by the quiet barista Kazu, the cheerful owner Nagare, and a quiet Ghost of a woman who guards the chair, these characters learn that while they cannot alter the present reality, the act of expressing their true feelings completely transforms their hearts and gives them the strength to face the future.

The brilliance of the café’s rules is that they remove the fantasy of control. In most stories about time travel, the past is a problem to be solved. Go back far enough, and one can prevent the accident, save the relationship, kill the tyrant, invest in the right company, or avoid whatever mistake has subsequently become intolerable. Time in the novel is not represented by a clock or some abstract metaphysical force. Instead, it is represented by a cup of steaming coffee and measured by the cup gradually losing its heat. The travellers to their past have only until the coffee becomes cold. The deadline is arbitrary, intimate, almost domestic, and yet it transforms the familiar cup of coffee into a measure of mortality. We have all experienced versions of this deadline. A conversation that we postpone, a phone call that we assume can be made tomorrow, parents we intend to visit during holidays, a friend we imagine will always be there, a relationship we believe has time to repair itself.

The characters who enter the café are not given additional time in any meaningful quantitative sense. They are given a few minutes. What changes is the quality of those minutes. The past becomes suddenly precious because the characters know precisely how little time they possess. Kawaguchi turns the familiar fantasy of ‘more time’ into better attention to the time already available. The novel asks its characters, and by extension its readers, to accept that the past cannot be changed. But it also constructs an elaborate fantasy in which people can return to the past precisely because they cannot bear to leave it alone. Acceptance is rarely achieved by simply deciding to accept. We revisit memories, replay conversations, imagine alternative sentences in our minds. We wonder what would have happened if we had arrived five minutes earlier or stayed five minutes longer. Kawaguchi’s café gives physical form to this universal mental habit. Kawaguchi ultimately asks a question that is simpler than its time travel premise and harder to answer: ‘If you were given one last conversation with someone you had lost, what would you say?’