Before the Coffee gets cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

 

Before the coffee gets cold by Toshikazu kawaguchi

Japanese fiction

Orignal title – コーヒーが冷めないうちに, Kohi ga Samenai Uchi n

Translator -Geoffrey Trousselot

Source – personal copy

I decide to pick a less taxing book for my next January in Japan read and I choose this book that has had a couple of follow-up books written as I had seen it around since it came out a couple of years ago and when I saw a second-hand copy I pick it up with this month in mind it always nice to have something easy to read between those more taxing reads. The book was originally a play before it was rewritten into a novel and has since been made into a film. It won a prize when it was a play the writer has been a member of a theatrical group and a playwright.

The cafe has no air conditioning. It opened in 1874, more than a hundred and forty years ago. Back then, people still used oil lamps for light. Over the years, the cafe underwent a few small renovations, but its interior today is pretty much unchanged from its original look. When it opened, the decor must have been considered very avant-garde. The commonly accepted date for the appearance of the modern cafe in Japan is around

1888 – a whole fourteen years later.

Coffee was introduced to Japan in the Edo period, around the late seventeenth century. Initially it didn’t appeal to Japanese taste buds and it was certainly not thought of as something one drank for enjoyment – which was no wonder, considering it tasted like black, bitter water.

The opening of the second story in the collection. the cafe has been there for a long time!!

The novel is set in a cafe that has been on the back streets of Tokyo for years but this cafe is different as it has a secret you buy your coffee and then you are told by the server that when you drink the coffee before it gets cold and you will be able to travel back in time. The book has four stories of four visitors to the cafe. There first is a tale of a love lost and maybe a chance to stop that lover from going away to the US. Then a nurse Kothake comes in she is trying to find a letter her husband who now has Alzheimer’s had written one of the last things he had done before the worst of his condition had hit this one really hit me I am just a person that has my emotions closer to the surface and this story hit home.I leave the other two for you top find out.

Fusagi had early onset Alzheimer’s disease, and was losing his memory. The disease causes rapid depletion of the brain’s neural cells. The brain pathologically atrophies, causing loss of intelligence and changes to the personality. One of the striking symptoms of early onset Alzheimer’s is how the deterioration of brain function appears so sporadic. Sufferers forget some things but remember other things. In Fusagi’s case, his memories were gradually disappearing, starting with the most recent. Meanwhile, his previously hard-to-please personality had been slowing mellowing.

Kothake husband he had written a letter before he got to bad to remember who he was!

As you may know, I tend to avoid hype books and this is why it had taken me so long tk get to this one I had seen out when it came out and the idea of the book is one I knew I would like the idea of reliving the past the chance to reset maybe even alter what happened is something that has appealed to me a like Adam Duritz said in the song Mrs Potter If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts and this is about that ghost of ones past the echoes we can relieve or reexperience or change stop that lover going find that letter etc the is a small bit of magic realism to this at times. The one problem is the book could have expanded the universe of the book out at times there is a sense of it being A stage play still as all the action is in the cafe which for a play works but in a novel, you could have let fly with the drinking of the coffee and time travel element of the book. This has two follow-up books because the format can run and run it has the same feeling of something like Call the midwife where we glimpse life’s hardest parts and this issue is the same it stirs the emotions of the reader and the second story touched me having lost my stepmother to dementia a similar condition the lose of the person before the loss of a person is so hard to deal with and the chance to reconnect must be reassuring as the want to find the letter. Have you read this or the two follow-up books?

Winstons score – B A tear jerker of a book but if you want a read a little different it is worth trying and can be read in an evening