Before the coffee gets cold

A cafe that serves strong enough coffee to transport one through time.

A quirky premise failed by such stilted writing. Kill your darlings the adage goes, but by that metric this is post-genocidal, hack-like storycraft.

Due to the international attention this book has attracted, I found myself wondering if it was a translation issue. Lo and behold - it was adapted into a novel from a theatrescript, where a significant amount of necessary emotion and artistry is delegated to the acting cast.

My fundamental problem with this book is that in converting "BTCGC" into a novel (for more $$$), not enough of that emotion and artistry has been added into the text. Characters' emotions race from zero to 100 in the space of a paragraph. Descriptions of setting and character appear to have been adapted directly from the writer's notes.

And yet, underneath it all is a charming and easy-to-read series of short stories. I would not hesistate to see it performed, although I have no appetite to read this book again in it's current form.

I read this as an audiobook which was probably a mistake. I think I struggled to keep the names straight partly because they were Japanese and less familiar but also because there were a lot of K names. If I had read this in physical form I could’ve easily backtracked to remember who was who. But ultimately it didn’t matter too much - I just needed to focus on the person who wanted to sit in the time travel chair.

The writing was also a bit too simplistic for me - not sure if that’s the style of the author or the translation or some combo. Many times there were details included that felt like filler because it wasn’t like it was written poetically or something. Other times people said/did things that felt artificially dumb and repetitive.

The stories are pretty sentimental but there was enough there to keep me going. I liked the structure of four chapters, four stories. I struggled with some of the overlapping aspects of the stories because of my problem with keeping the names straight, but I liked that it was there. I also enjoyed the use of the magical element of the chair to explore grief and regret. It didn’t feel like I got something really special out of the book, but it was thoughtful.

Imagine there's a café in your neighborhood. A small, basement café barely large enough to hold a few booths, a few tables, and a counter. This café, though, has a bit of a poorly-kept secret, in that if you sit at one of the seats in the café, you can travel back in time. You can't leave the seat, you can't change the past, and you have to drink the coffee put in front of you before it gets cold, but you can travel back in time. What would you change? Obviously you'd be limited to people in the café, or people who have visited the café, but things can still be said, people you've visited with can be revisited, and, essentially, closure could be had.

This short book consists of four short stories set inside this café involving visitors and staff members who each discover a need to revisit the past. The four stories are different, but they're the same in that each person reaches some form of closure they need to move on in their lives.

I think I was expecting something different from the description here, and ultimately I was left with vague dissatisfaction, but not enough to really quit reading. You never find out some key points of how or why you can time travel in this café or any consequences for people who break the rules. The stories told were each nice enough, but I didn't really feel moved by any of them. I think I liked the second story the best and the fourth story the least, if we're keeping track.

It's not a bad read, and very quick, so don't let my vague annoyance dissuade you from giving it a try. I honestly wish I had a café (any café, with or without time travel) that was as cozy as this on sounds in my own neighborhood.

The 4.3 stars from 1,400 reviews on Amazon had me expecting this to be a great book. It's not. The characters have little depth, as do the chapters, which are more like short stories. (This is more of an anthology of four interconnected stories than a novel.) One of the stories is good, two are okay, and one is just bad.

Sometimes a book with poor storytelling can be saved by brilliant writing. This is not one of those books. It's possible that some of the author's literary prowess was lost in translation, but there's no way a translator could present something so poorly written and still find work. Kawaguchi seems to be on a mission to break every rule about how to write well.

I'm stunned (not really) this got published and has received such praise. Fortunately it's a quick read that you can probably finish before the coffee gets... never mind. I'll show myself out.