CBR 17 BINGO: Work, because the stories take place in the coffee shop where Kei, Nagare, and Kazu all work
Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a collection of four short stories loosely combined into a novel. The characters overlap from story to story, and some incidents in earlier stories come into play later in the book, but for the most part, each chapter stands alone.
The Funiculi Funicular, run by husband and wife team Nagare and Kei, appears to be an ordinary cafe, but there’s an urban legend attached to it: supposedly, visitors can travel back in time. Many rules govern this limited means of time travel: 1) You have to sit in a certain seat; 2) You can’t move from that seat during the experience or you immediately return to the present; 3) This means you can only visit someone who has been to the cafe; 4) Visiting won’t change anything that has happened in the past; and 5) You must return before the coffee gets cold (that one is critical, more on that later).
With so many limitations, what’s the point of time travel? For Fumiko, a young woman in “The Lovers,” it means she can say some things to her boyfriend that she wanted to say before he left for America, and possibly learn what drives him. For Hirai in “The Sisters,” it means learning about her deceased sister’s dream. In all cases, the travelers can’t change the past, but they can change their understanding of the past and so adjust their approach to the future.
This all sounds nice, and nothing about this book particularly bothered me, but the substance was. . . thin. The characters don’t have much in the way of dimension and the sentimentality is a tad cloying. Sad things happen, but I never felt sad. The book also takes much longer to get going than it should. In addition to the rules outlined above, there’s a ghost woman who sits in the time-travel chair, and travelers have to wait for her to get up and go to the bathroom before they can claim the seat, because trying to force her out of the chair results in a nasty curse. Apparently this woman was someone who took too long drinking her coffee and didn’t make it back in time, which makes this somewhat of a horror story, but that’s never addressed. The only real purpose the ghost woman seems to serve is for a comical bit where Kazu, the server, keeps pouring her more and more coffee to get her to get up to pee (this is not how I understood the non-corporeal existence, but okay).
I was surprised to learn this book is the first in a series and though I have questions (Will we learn more about the ghost woman? Does a cat ever make an appearance?) I don’t think I’ll be continuing. I struggled with how to rate this book–it didn’t annoy me enough to give it 2 stars, but 3 seems generous. I’m probably settled at 2.5 stars. If you are looking for some very, very light reading for a cozy afternoon, it might suit you.