Before the coffee gets cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
July 02, 20234 min read
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
Kawaguchi’s Before the coffee gets cold is simple in its prose and storyline, but speaks volumes if you let it seep into you. Reading each word slowly, you can feel the emotion wash over you.
The storyline is simple, a forgotten café cosy with only a few seats earned a humble infamy for allowing customers to visit the past. However, this infamy also came and went, until that too was forgotten and only a few people frequented the café.
The novel is structured in lives of a few characters who through circumstance, wish to travel in time. There are a litany of rules to follow, and the most damning is that nothing you do changes the present. Despite this, we see that it does indeed change things.
One can criticise that nothing objectively happened, but that’s missing the point.
“The present hadn’t changed—but those two people had. Both Kohtake and Hirai returned to the present with a changed heart.”
You can take it as a metaphor that a change in perspective is often more important and reliable than trying to change the past.
Read on 28th June 2023
Spoilers below:
The awkwardness and worry in Kumi's look made Hirai feel like it was her who was living her final hours, like someone in a sentimental television drama suddenly redeeming herself in the face of death. She felt her eyes redden at the cruel irony. She wasn't the one who was going to die. Overwhelmed by a way of emotion, she could no longer maintain eye contact and lowered her gaze.
'You just promised...' she said with a trembling voice. 'You just promised your sister, didn't you? That you would return to the inn.' Kumi's happy elated smile was branded onto the back of her closed eyelids. 'You said that you would run it alongside her.'
“But Kazu still goes on believing that, no matter what difficulties people face, they will always have the strength to overcome them. It just takes heart. And if the chair can change someone’s heart, it clearly has its purpose.”
“The present hadn’t changed—but those two people had. Both Kohtake and Hirai returned to the present with a changed heart.”
“Kazu’s drawings were hyper-realist. Using only pencils, she created works that appeared as true to life as actual photographs, but she could only draw things she could observe herself; her drawings never depicted the imaginary or the invented. People don’t see things and hear things as objectively as they might think. The visual and auditory information that enters the mind is distorted by experiences, thoughts, circumstances, wild fancies, prejudices, preferences, knowledge, awareness, and countless other workings of the mind. Pablo Picasso’s sketch of a nude man that he did at age eight is remarkable. The painting he did at age fourteen of a Catholic communion ceremony is very realistic. But later, after the shock of his best friend’s suicide, he created paintings in shades of blue that became known as the Blue Period. Then he met a new lover and created the bright and colourful works of the Rose Period. Influenced by African sculptures, he became part of the cubist movement. Then he turned to a neoclassical style, continued on to surrealism, and eventually painted the famous works The Weeping Woman and Guernica. “Taken together, these artworks show the world as seen through Picasso’s eyes. They are the result of something passing through the filter that is Picasso. Until now, Kazu had never sought to challenge or influence people’s opinions or behaviour. This was because her own feelings didn’t form part of the filter through which she interacted with the world.”
