"Before the Coffee Gets Cold"

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Translated by Geoffrey Trousselot

Book Club Pick

Pages: 272 Genre: literary fiction, magical realism

Rating: 3.5 Stars

There is a small, family-owned café in Tokyo that has served unique and carefully-brewed coffee for many years. But the café is known mostly for the legend that says one seat will give you the ability to go back in time. Before the Coffee Gets Cold follows four people who all have people they're hoping to talk to. What would you do if you could go back in time?

I'll say now that this review is very subjective. My feelings about this book are complicated, because I liked it in general. It reminded me a lot of They Both Die at the End, which I also really enjoy. I like books where there's a magic system that no one is trying to solve but is being used to teach the main characters something about love and being human. Something about that will always appeal to me, even if the execution is questionable.

And questionable it was. If I review the book with logic instead of emotion, the whole thing read a bit too conservative and misogynistic for my taste.

Of the four stories, the second one was definitely the best. The first and third were okay — the first was bland and expositional and the third's ending fell flat. It was the fourth one was a little bit too pro life and led me straight to other Goodreads reviews, which is when I really put together the whole "conservative and misogynistic" thing.

Objectively, I should probably not like this book that much. I definitely wasn't filled with the desire to read the others, and I might not come back to it for a while. But, when taken at face value, I did enjoy reading the stories. It was easy to get emotionally invested in them, and a few of the characters were interesting enough to make me really care.

I might not recommend the book to anyone else, but I personally don't regret the time spent having read the book.