Before the coffee gets cold is a novel by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated from Japanese to English by Geoffrey Trousselot. The french version of the novel, Tant que le café est encore chaud, was translated by Miyako Slocombe (2021). The book was first released in 2015 and was adapted from it's 2010 play. In 2018, a movie adaptation was released called Café Funiculi Funicula.
The story goes like this: There’s a small coffee shop in Tokyo called Funiculi Funicula. It’s a place that serves coffee and keepsake of many stories of love, lost, new beginnings and family. You see, there’s something quite unique about Funiculi Funicula...
...It's a Time Machine… If you could go back, who would you want to meet?...
To fully immersed in the unfolding stories, I used the relationship map quite often during my reading sessions. Everytime actually. I realised not all copies have a map. As I don't usually read science fiction novels, I found the map useful even before reading the book as I was able to put myself in right mindset and knew what to expect.
As in any time travel related stories, there are rules to follow...
There tends to be, in any movie or novel about time travel, some rule saying, Don't go meddling in anything that is going to change the present.
En général, dans les films ou les romans qui traitent de voyage dans le temps, il est interdit de provoquer une action dans le passé qui aurait des conséquences sur le présent.
...These rules are
You can only meet people who have visited the coffee shop
You cannot change the present
There’s only one seat you can sit at to go to the past ‘that’ seat!
You have to stay in that seat while in the past
You must return before the coffee gets cold
As a coffee and tea drinker, this last rule is ridiculous and an impossible task. My drinks are always cold and I take ages to finish a cuppa. This rule would be so easy to break!
Each chapter reveals complex human relationships and the opportunity to go back in time to repair and heal stories of love, lost, new beginnings and family. Feels like a counselling session where you may be transported to another time to reflect and make sense of past to be able to function in the present.
There are so many reviews of this novel. It is described as a science fiction novel, quirky, charming and heartbreaking. Debora and Sitohang (2023) argued that the novel is more that and explored the story as a magical realist fiction because:
it has elements of magic
we can connect to own everyday life- sitting in a coffee shop
there are unsettling doubts about the magical happenings at the coffee shop
of the merging of the real world and the supernatural world
of the disruption of time during time travel experiences
I enjoyed reading this article alongside the book as well. Here is the full article Magical Realism in Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before The Coffee Gets Cold (2023) if you are interested to find out more:
Both the English and French copies are available at Mo Zistwar online:
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