I’ve been having a string of bad luck with books. I’ve read some really crappy novels and it’s put me in a bad mood. I had saved the second book in the ‘Before the Coffee Gets Cold’ series for times like these. I had enjoyed the first book, which had felt like a warm, comforting hug. So, naturally, I expected the second book to get me out of this reading rut. But I’ve only sunk in deeper. The stories in ‘Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the Café’ felt forced and repetitive. It was, I feel, an unnecessary extension of a good book. As the first book was an instant bestseller upon its publication in 2015, the writer and publisher probably thought a sequel was in order. But too much of a good thing, I guess.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold tells the story of a café in Tokyo where customers are given a chance to travel back in time. But there are some conditions of time travel: They must sit in a particular seat and not get up—they will be forcibly brought back to the present if they do so. And they must also return to the present before the coffee gets cold, else they will forever be stuck in the past. There are four stories: There’s a woman who goes back in her past to confront the lover who left her, a wife who wants to get a letter her husband wrote to her before his memory started to fade, a pub owner who is estranged from her family but wants to see her sister one last time, and a mother who travels 10 years into her future to get a glimpse of the daughter she never got to meet.

Tales from the Café picks up where the first book left off. There are four more stories in this one. There is the man who has raised his best friend’s child as his own, another who missed his mother’s funeral, a lover who travels to the future to see the woman he couldn’t marry, and a detective who wants to give a birthday gift to his wife. There is a lot of potential there but the rehashed stories evoke a strong sense of déjà vu. It’s the same issue but with different characters. The appeal is lost. The repeated mentions of the café rules also take away from the stories.

I was shaking my head, saying okay, okay, I get it. The only good thing about the book is that you get to know more about the people you meet in the first book—those who run, work in, and frequent the café. So many questions that I had about the café and its people after reading the first book was answered in the second one. But apart from that, there’s nothing new in this one to make it engaging and worthwhile.

2 stars

Fiction

Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the Café

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Translated from the Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot

Published: 2017

Publisher: Sunmark Publishing, Inc.