Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Toshikazu Kawaguchi (trans. Geoffrey Trousselot)
2015/ 2019
Picador
pp. 224
Toshikazu Kawaguchi (trans. Geoffrey Trousselot)
2015/ 2019
Picador
pp. 224
I chanced upon this book while looking for books by Japanese authors. Admittedly, it is the name of the book that caught my attention. Coffee and book together make a strong combination and I thought this must be written by someone who understands reading. The book is quite intriguing and I tried searching for more about the author but did not find much except that he seems to have been a screenwriter.
The book has been made into a movie by the name of ‘Cafe Funiculi Funicula’. I tried searching for an English version of the same or one with English subtitles on Netflix and Prime but haven’t come across anything.
The amount of time I have spent searching about the book shows that I found the book particularly intriguing. The setting of the story is almost entirely in the Cafe named Funiculi Funicula. The cafe owes its distinction to the special facility of time travel provided in the cafe. There are a bunch of rules around the use of the facility but there is no explanation given to how the place came to be. It sort of has been like this for a long time and going by the processes in the book it seems to continue to be for at least over a decade.
I might have missed it, but I did not find a reference to the time setting of the book. This may have been deliberate. The characters are interesting in reinforcing my belief that everyone has a story. The writing is engaging and it is difficult to leave the book once you start. The only place where I found it problematic was the repetition of the rules of time travel which seemed to be reiterated several times. It may have seemed okay in the movie, but in the book I just wanted to move on. Maybe it is because it is the translation, but the book is story driven rather than writing driven. The character of the ghost could have been developed more but the author chose to leave many things shrouded in mystery. Almost every other character has been dealt with in greater detail and I found this to be a missing element. Besides this, I quite enjoyed the book and am left wondering, when would I like to travel to – past or future- knowing that I can’t change the present either way!