If you could go back to the past, who would you want to meet? That is what a basement cafe in a back alley in Tokyo offers. A chance to go back to the past to meet someone for the last time.
Before you think "oh, another time-travel book", let me tell you this is not your regular time-travel piece. There are four rules in this time-travel cafe.
First, no matter what you do while you're in the past it will not change the present. Even if you warned the person who had died in a car accident to avoid a certain route, that person would still die by some other means.
Second, you may only meet people who had been to the cafe.
Third, there is only one seat in the cafe that takes you back to the past. You must remain seated in that seat the entire time you're back in the past. If your butt so much as leaves the chair by just 0.001 millimeter you would be wrenched back immediately to the present. And since you have only one chance to travel back to the past in your whole life, you wouldn't want to waste that chance.
Fourth, you are transported to the past when the coffee is poured and returned to the present when you finished the coffee. You must return to the present before the coffee gets cold, or you would turn into a ghost.
Now, with those premises, the book sounds like fun, right? That's what I thought. Unfortunately, the author failed to deliver. I skipped through more pages than I could count.
Before The Coffee Gets Cold has four stories that are interconnected. If I have to liken the stories to food, then the plots are mere side dishes.
The main dishes are long narratives of repetitive description of the cafe, undue emphasis on the clothes and appearance of the characters and what everyone is thinking. It is like everyone inside the cafe has a permanent thought bubble up there in the air.
Now, if those thoughts help move the story along, fine, I can accept that even if it leaves out all the mystery. But they don't. Not all of them, at any rate.
But the worst is that each story re-introduces the characters, the cafe and how things are done in great detail. I felt insulted. It was like as if the author thought his readers have Alzheimer's and needed reminding. Either that or his readers are exceptionally slow and dim.
The only thing I was curious about in the book was the identity of the resident ghost in the cafe, a woman dressed in white. And it was that curiosity that compelled me to read the second installment, Tales of the Cafe.
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