Book: Before the coffee gets cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

I’m no expert when it comes to Japanese literature, so there are a bunch of things I can attribute to being “lost in translation”. It’s fairly common when phrases and idioms don’t cross linguistic borders too well, at times causing grave disservice to the source. But from what I can surmise on reading various takes and reviews on this book from others, this definitely wasn’t my…umm…cup of tea.

The book features four stories revolving around the patrons of a cafe participating in the convoluted yet interesting mode of time travel. All stories are discrete yet tied together by the cafe as multiple characters weave in and out of every story to form some decent world building.

Now when I hear time travel, my ears perk up. Nothing gets the Science Fiction in me tingling like a good time travel story. But fair warning, a time travel story this might be. Science fiction this is not. Honestly, nothing from the cover to the blurb indicates any form of SciFi, so that misunderstanding is totally on me.

So what is it if not SciFi? An anthology of tragic stories. And when I say tragic I don’t mean in the Shakespearean sense. But more on the lines of malayalam daily soaps where every actor has a clause which states the need to cry X times per episode to keep the audience engrossed. This book seems to be heartlessly geared towards wanting to make the reader cry.

Here’s the thing. A good cry can be cathartic. I really wanted to let out a good cry. But probably cause I’m dead inside or something just took me out of the book while reading it, it had close to no effect on me. Probably, apart from the story on the Husband and Wife, since it involved old age and disease. And that stuff, even devoid of a story, has the potency to make me bawl.

So breaking this down…

The good:

• There’s a kawaii-ness to how the whole story is painted in your head while reading it. It’s got a cuteness to it.
• The intertextuality of the stories. There are minor character crossovers, but all grounded by the common thread that is the staff off the cafe. I like crossovers in any form I guess.
• If you’re not a soulless blob like me and are in the need of a soul cleansing cry, then this might work for you.

The awful:

• The time travel aspect of this story is wholly contrived. It is an amorphous mechanism just meant to service the plot, but gets repeated ad nauseam just to make it seem consistent.
• There is a lot of weird male gaze happening here which borders on voyeuristic most times. Women are constantly introduced by what they’re wearing down to the details on every colour. Even if it aids you in visualising things better, it definitely gets clear that this is a man writing stories on women. I’m not sure if there is some cultural aspect to this I’m overlooking, but as a reader it feels oddly intrusive.
• I couldn’t take the sappiness after a point. Despite the heavy nature of grief encapsulating this book, the unrestrained barrage of sad events and exchanges make it seem artificial. As if this combination of grief and sadness was concocted in a lab to generate maximum tear jerking potential.

This being a bestseller does indicate a vast majority liking this. And there could be a lot of Japanese cultural aspects bottlenecked by translations through the English language. But no amount of justification was a balm on the hurt of making me realise I might be an emotionless automaton.

Also, the cover features a cat. There’s no cat in the book. Minus 5.