Before The Coffee Gets Cold is a novel by Toshikazu Kawaguchi that was originally written as a play. The book is set in a small Japanese café that lets its customers travel through time, but only under very specific circumstances. The barista Kazu is the only one who can brew the coffee that lets you travel in time, and there is only one specific seat where you can drink it. The rules are that you can only meet people who have been to the café at some point in time, and whatever you do will not change the present. You can’t get up from your seat, and most importantly, in order to go back to the present, you must finish drinking your coffee before it gets cold.

The book is structured as four short stories about four different people who want to travel in time for various reasons. The first story is about a young couple in the midst of a breakup, the second tells of a married woman and her Alzheimer-stricken husband, the third is about two estranged sisters, and the last one is about a mother and her daughter. Aside from the customers, there is the staff, who serve as the common thread throughout the novel.

Once you know that the book is based on a play, the structure of the story makes a lot of sense. The cast of characters is very small, and the customers overlap and play a part in each other’s stories despite the book’s clear sectioning. I enjoyed that aspect of the book a lot because I felt that it made me, as the reader, care more about the characters since I knew that they wouldn’t just disappear after their turn in the time-traveling chair.

One thing that I liked was how complicated the rules for traveling in time were. It helped to set this book apart from a lot of other urban fantasy novels, since the time traveling wasn’t really the point of the book, it was a tool to bring out these people’s stories. A big theme of this book is regret, poor communication, and what that can do to a relationship. I think that the idea of drinking the coffee before it gets cold is a metaphor for how you should seize the moment before it’s too late and not let words go unspoken.

I was very emotionally moved by this book. I cried during every story except for the first one, and even made my friend cry by retelling the plot to her afterwards. The suffocated feeling of being on borrowed time whenever the characters time-traveled was done very well and was very immersive. 

The one thing that I didn’t enjoy about the story was probably some of the more conservative themes regarding the female characters. I’m not completely sure if it was intentional or just a culture clash, but I felt like there was a big focus on being a wife and a mother, and it ended up either flattening some characters or almost punishing them for their individuality.

This book actually has a movie adaptation that we ended up watching together at Tales Bookcafé when we had our latest meetup, so if you’ve read the book and are curious to see it, I’d recommend it! Although be aware that there are some changes in the plot that had us divided on whether we liked it or not.

All in all, I give this book a 3.5/5! It was a good book, but you need to be in the right headspace for it, not a lot of physical action and a lot of emotions. This is actually the first book in a series, and although I think that I’ll probably read the next one eventually, it’ll probably take a while until I’m back in the right mood for it. 

The next book is Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus and that meeting will be in Canggu! See you on October 11th!

Elvira Svensson