KAWAGUCHI Toshikazu : Before the coffee gets cold

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.
In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to : confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks : customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold...

 

 

I wonder why there is a cat on the cover. Cat lovers, be aware : there is no cat inside this novel ! And after this very important  information that you couldn't have lived without, let's move on to the review...

What first struck me in this short novel was the setting, like a play : in a single room (the café), with a limited cast of characters, little stories rhythmed by the clanging of the door bell. Once I reached the end of the book, I saw that the author is a playwright - that explains a lot.

 

Yet it doesn't mean that it's not worth reading, oh no ! Maybe some will find the style simplistic, but I found it sober : it goes straight to the essential, so does the plot. The characters who want to travel through time also have the same urgency to deliver or receive an important message in a very little amount of time - before the coffee gets cold. You don't linger ! But the simplicity is deceptive, I think this story, or these stories, were very well planned and organized. Four chapters, four stories, lots of rules that discourage people from queueing up in the street outside the café and keep the characters to a minimum. I was in tears reading the second chapter (reminded me of my mother) so I advise you to keep at least a handkerchief close by. But it's not a sad novel, it's beautiful and very human.

I found it hard to put down, I really enjoyed reading it... so I bought the next, Tales from the café, that I will read very soon. I hope the story of the ghost is inside, I'm dying to know how she got here !