Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

If you, like me, wept cleansing tears after reading Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune, or felt healed playing indie game Coffee Talk, you’ll probably want to try Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. This is an understated tale of magical realism featuring a small and endearing cast of characters, a wry touch of humor, and a deep well of empathetic human insight.

In the interconnected stories of this book, several people with regrets come to the hidden café where (reportedly) you can travel in time. They learn from the café’s quirky staff that it’s true, although there are some rules:

1- you can only travel to the café, nowhere else.

2- no matter what you do in the past, the present will not change.

3- there’s only one seat where you can travel back.

4- you cannot leave the seat while traveling in time or you’ll snap back to the present.

5- you’ll travel back as your cup of coffee is poured, and the effect will only last until the coffee gets cold.

6- you have to drink the whole cup of coffee, or risk becoming a ghost, stuck forever.

For me, this book did take a second to acclimate to; it’s fairly evident by the syntax that it’s been translated from Japanese. There are also different cultural norms to get used to in the characters’ behavior. However, the stories are relatable, and the elements of difference only serve to accentuate that. Readers are likely to come out of this book feeling they’ve glimpsed something essential and real about human existence — and maybe processed some feelings of their own along the way.

If you’ve heard the hype but weren’t sure if it’s worth it (spoilers: it is!), or if you like translated books, quirky characters on emotional journeys, and cool cafés, you should definitely try this book.

Online Reading Challenge – Halfway Home!

Hello Challenge Readers!

How has the month of March been treating you? Have you found a great book or movie set in Japan? For many of us (and this is a massive over-generalization), the Japanese culture can be very foreign in a way that Europe is not. Western European culture permeates our lives here – even if we have no European blood, we easily recognize and mostly understand their literature and customs (this seems especially true of Great Britain whose power and influence at one time stretched across the globe). Japan, on the other hand, was closed to foreigners, with few exceptions, for centuries and sometimes seems to be an enigma even now.

Of course, no matter our differences we are, at heart, much the same – we love our families, we know pain and joy, great tragedy and incredible luck. It’s simply the setting and the way our society teaches us to handle these truths that is different. And isn’t that why we travel and why we read about other lives? To understand our differences and to see our similarities?

I’ve read an incredibly good book for our Japan adventure – The Dictionary of Mutual Understanding by Jackie Copleton. One day Amaterasu Takahashi opens to the door of her home in the United States to a young man with hideous scars on his face and hands. He claims he is her grandson Hideo Watanabe who she believed had died when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, forty years ago. She is understandably skeptical and wary and also frightened – his appearance reopens a very painful part of Ama’s life, of family secrets, betrayals, regrets and loss, pain that she has shut away and is now forced to confront.

What follows is a look back at Ama’s life, her poor, desperate youth, the daughter she protected fiercely, the husband who brought her a measure of peace. When the Allies drop the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, both Ama’s daughter and grandson were within the bomb blast and though they search for days, weeks, months, Ama and her husband are unable to find anything of their beloved child and grandchild. Eventually they move to the United States and Ama is able to fairly successfully ignore the pain of the past – at least until the man claiming to be Hideo arrives.

Descriptions of the day of the bomb and its horrible aftermath are vivid but not sensationalized. And while the fact of the bomb is a shadow throughout the book, it is not an the focus of the story. It is simply an unchangeable fact, a division between the past and the future. And while this may sound like a grim, depressing novel, it is actually about finding joy and accepting happiness and learning to not just survive, but to live.

I also liked that at the beginning of each chapter a Japanese word would be defined and explained. These words usually described concepts that are uniquely Japanese values and do not translate easily to English or to Western society. Many of these concepts are rooted in the ancient history of Japan and Buddhist philosophy and are a fascinating clue to what makes Japan distinctive. This added a lot of depth and understanding to the actions of the characters. This is one of those books that you keep thinking about long after you finish. Highly recommended.

What about you? What are you reading this month?