Another Book Club pick! Before the Coffee Gets Cold dips into the mysterious realm of time travel, except it comes loaded with rules. The stories are split into those who time travelled, Fumiko and Goro, Kazu and Hirai, Kei and (spoilers!) her future child. These pairs acted as the core relationships and I must admit I did get a little teary at two of the stories.
Oddly enough, the rules don’t seem to be as simple or as concrete as the book would make out. I’m still undecided about whether having the rules ultimately added to the story or hindered it. I think the main issue lay with having such strict rules (that added mystery and a self-awareness) but being able to break the rules with little consequence or explanation. For example, many of the characters are able to bring back physical mementos from the past – photos, letters etc. If this is the case, surely the present has been changed (the biggest rule!) as the present character now owns something and therefore the course of time would’ve been different. Sure, owning an item in the present that should’ve stayed in the past may seem small, but these are emotionally-loaded items that carry relationship-changing power. If the characters are able to change the way in which the present has been reached, surely they have changed the past, present and their future? If someone understands time travel more than me, please get in touch (Dr Who maybe?). This novel (almost short enough to be a novella) was originally a play and I feel like the visual tropes fed into it a lot whilst I was reading it. The mystery of the clocks was one of the repetitive tropes, where only the middle clock tells the correct time. At the start, it felt like a clichéd nod to the time travel expectations of the reader. By the end, after the detail was exaggerated, it felt a little overdone. I definitely felt that some of these repetitions and over-explanation of the rules were stage directions that had no translated well into prose. The ghost was also a constant yet unexplained feature– a hauntingly present figure throughout the book. Again, I feel like she would’ve worked better on-stage but in the book, I craved to have a deeper emotional insight into how she got there.
Kawaguchi’s style of writing wasn’t popular was the entire group but I personally found it reflective of a Japanese sense of restraint. The emotions were controlled and levelled outside of the time travelling scenarios, but when relived the inability to expression their emotions were once renewed. So, at many times during this book I found myself urging the characters to just say how they feel. Breaking the barriers that inhibit and repress our emotions isn’t easy!
Mood: when you need something light but serious
Read again: in a couple of years
Image Credit: Julius Schorzman / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)
I HAD THE BLUES 