Before the Coffee Gets Cold, by Kawaguchi Toshikazu

Translated By Geoffrey Trousselot

(2015, translated 2020)

Hanover Square Press

(Novel)

Kawaguchi is a successful playwright; Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a novelization of one of his own plays. It certainly reads like a play: there is a single location, the small, narrow, and windowless cafe called Funiculi-Funicula; the events transpire over a few days, and as the small cast of characters enters the scene, Kawaguchi hastily sketches out their costumes, gets them to their positions, and lets them speak. Kawaguchi’s conceit is that the cool underground cafe, a relic of the Meiji era that can only accommodate nine customers–six at three tables and three on stools–is able to send customers who are desperate enough back in time. Sitting at a certain table and visualizing the person they desire to speak with, a customer can travel back to a time when they know the person they want to see was in the cafe and speak with them for a brief period of time–for as long as it takes the time-traveler’s coffee to grow cold. There are a number of rules; the most frustrating is that whatever is said or done in the past will not change the present. The magical table is guarded by a ghost; the only way a traveler can make the leap into the past is to wait for her to use the restroom. Should an impatient traveler attempt to remove the ghost, they will be cursed. And if the traveler lingers in the past too long, they will be doomed to take the place of the ghost-guardian of the table. The story features four scenes: “The Lovers,” “Husband and Wife,” “The Sisters,” and “Mother and Child.” 

“She had once looked at what he wrote. He had been listing the destinations that he had traveled to in order to visit gardens. She had simply assumed his actions were a hangover from his love of his work as a landscape gardener. But she was wrong. The destinations he made a note of were all the places that he had visited with her. She didn’t notice at the time. She couldn’t see. These notes were the last handhold for Fusagi, who was gradually forgetting who she was.” (105)