Toshikazu Kawaguchi: Before the Coffee gets Cold

Hi everyone

Before the Coffee Gets Cold is the first book in the series of the same name by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. I got this book from Bol.com.

"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 . . .
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?"  

To be honest, it was very forgettable.

I hoped the book would be profoundly moving, charming, thoughtful, and lovely to read. Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to those expectations.
The stories all follow the same format, so after the second story, it felt very repetitive. Especially repeating the rules of time travel every single time was so unnecessary. It really felt like Toshikazu Kawaguchi thinks we’re all stupid.

The stories are all overly simple in both plot and writing style, and it’s obvious their sole purpose is to make us emotional. The characters are very stereotypical, one-dimensional, and old-fashioned.
From the very first story, I felt incredulous at these characters. The woman in the first story is a smart and highly respected manager who speaks multiple languages, but after her time-travel moment, she has the epiphany that she should wait for her boyfriend to come back and she’ll be happy. In another story, a woman gives up all her own hopes and dreams to make her parents happy. What? Mind you, this book was written in 2019 and is also set in that time. It was impossible to feel connected to the characters.

So yeah, interesting premise and lots of potential; but that’s it.

Have you read Before the Coffee Gets Cold? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Happy reading!
Helena