Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Toshikazu Kawaguchi)

Before the Coffee Gets Cold
The Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, Book 1
Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated by Geoffrey Trousselot
Hanover Square Press
Fiction, Fantasy/Literary Fiction
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: There are plenty of flashy eateries in Tokyo, but only one with a unique secret. In a nondescript back alley, down a short flight of stairs, lies the café named Funiculi Funicula. It's a small, quiet establishment where a visitor can get home-churned butter, strong coffee brewed from Ethiopian beans... and, in a chair normally occupied by a ghost, one can travel back in time.
There are rules, of course. They must wait until the ghost leaves the chair on her own or face a terrible curse. Travelers can't leave the chair, let alone the building, so they can only visit people whom they know will be in the café when they choose to arrive. Nothing they do or say will change the present. Nobody can travel more than once, so they need to make their one journey worthwhile. And they must return to the here and now before their coffee gets cold, or they'll end up replacing the resident ghost.
Many dismiss it as an urban legend, and those who don't consider it next to useless: after all, with all the restrictions, what is the point of such limited time travel? But for a handful of customers at Funiculi Funicula - a career-driven woman who may have lost her one chance at personal happiness, the wife who is losing her husband to dementia, a family black sheep seeking to undo her greatest regret, and a woman determined to find out if her greatest sacrifice was in vain - those precious few minutes before the coffee cools are worth their weight in gold.

REVIEW: I was intrigued by the concept and the low-key stakes (I wasn't in the mood for anything big at the moment), and once again the length made it ideal to slot into the listening lineup on my Libby app for a workday. While Before the Coffee Gets Cold does deliver what it promises, it also dithers, repeats, and meanders to the point of irritation, drawing out foregone conclusions and seeming to forget its own time constraints to milk every moment for extra word count, all to the detriment of the rating.
The reader "meets" the café with businesswoman Fumiko and the conversation where she loses the man she'd hoped to marry as he chooses an overseas career over staying in Tokyo... only later realizing the serendipitous fact that her fateful meeting took place in the one place where a do-over was possible. The barista Kazu then explains the rules, including the need to deal with the ghostly woman who normally occupies the special chair and the various restrictions on time travel, leading to Fumiko's transit into the past - where her emotions cause her to hem and haw and quite nearly bungle things worse than the first time around. This pattern hold true for every other transit, even by people more familiar with the café and the whole time travel deal: a woman suffering some manner of heartache or loss hems and haws, finally travels through time, then undergoes such extreme emotional swings and distress they can barely gasp out the words they violated the flow of the space-time continuum to speak. At first it adds to the atmosphere and characterization, but there comes to be a sameness to how the women get overemotional before, during, and after the journeys, and how their stories are drawn out with repetition after repetition after repetition (after repetition after repetition) of dialog, details, memories, feelings, and more. I think the book would've been half as long had just a fraction of those repetitions been trimmed. The last story grinds in the overall themes of personal sacrifice for the sake of love and draws out its foregone conclusions by making the characters too oblivious to clue in to facts so obvious they might as well have been written in neon lights across the walls of Funiculi Funicula.
While I could appreciate the interesting concept, the low-key intimate stakes of time travel on a personal scale, and the decently-drawn characters and situations (when said characters and situations weren't being wrung out like a wet cloth to squeeze every last word-drop out of their fibers), and some of the emotions rung deep and true, at some point I was just grinding my teeth wanting everyone to stop dithering and get on with their stories already. (Especially that last one... one of the fastest ways to make me lose my empathy for a character is to make them less intelligent than the cooling cup of coffee in their hands just to pad word count).

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