Book Review – Before The Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

This book is not in my usual spinner, even with the time travel aspect of it, but a friend’s wife liked it, and I wanted to make sure he was in a relationship with someone who had a passing taste in books. You know how it is. In the past 10 years, the cozy mystery novel has pumped out millions of stories, most of banality. Here is a cozy sci-fi novel that is Japanese in setting and rooted in the culture. Understanding that this is a translation, the review won’t harp on any of the clunky aspects of I,t but that is not to say that it is prevalent in the majority.

The plot focuses on the four stories that take place in the coffee shop where the port is guarded by a Japanese woman who is a ghost who curses anyone who tries to take the seat that one has to be in. There are a number of other rules, and the book grinds to a halt within the first half of the book to remind you over and over and over and over of them. The first story involves a girlfriend character who is absolutely annoying, and it doesn’t help with the initial pacing of it. By the second story, which is better, the reminder of the rules again was almost a stopping point for me, as I believed that this would happen in the other two stories, and therefore be half the book. That did not become the case, and I understand the Japanese love their rules, but it was a bit much. The fact that the rules must be followed isn’t unique, other than the fact that this version of time travel makes it so that no matter what one does, they cannot change the past. The odd thing about this is that the book gives a thought experiment of a person getting shot by someone traveling back in time, and they would be taken to the hospital and saved, and all the things that needed to go right would absolutely go right. Well, I do believe the fact that one is still shot would be something that’s definitely changed about a person. One could say that the point of the story is not to figure out the time travel but it the means which we see the four stories unfold. While that is true, the story brings this up time and time again throughout the story. Michael Critchton’s Timeline attempted to do something along these lines, and it didn’t work for that book either.

Out of the four vignettes, each starts as a tragedy, and that’s really where all time travel stories start. Each one does wind up in a better place for the time-traveling character. The first story of a boyfriend and girlfriend is the worst one. The main character is very annoying and almost caused me to stop the book (along with so many explanations of the rules). However, the second story of the husband and wife was very sweet, and I would also say, very Japanese. This book isn’t going to do well for the progressive feminists. The third story, of two sisters, is probably the best, even if the ending tended to make me say, “Well, of course that’s what she wanted”. The fourth of the mother and child was sweet but it seemed shorter than the other ones and involved a few more characters that would have been nice to build out more with the same care the other stories were given.

This book isn’t going to be for everyone, and it was barely in my wheelhouse, but I’m just a renaissance man who is reading this book for friendship and love. If you like short stories in a common setting and like character resolutions, especially in a Japanese cultural setting, you’ll enjoy this. If you’re not into scifi as much, this only uses the time travel mechanics as a story mechanic to complete the arc of the characters. But oh, those rules!