Book Review: Tales From The Cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

The only reason I read the second installment of Before The Coffee Gets Cold is my curiosity about the resident ghost in the cafe.

In the seat that takes you back to the past is a woman in a white dress. She had gone to the past to meet her dead husband and failed to return to the present. If you try to forcefully remove her from the seat, she curses you. You can only occupy the seat when she leaves the seat to use the toilet once a day. Yes, this ghost uses the toilet!!

While I did find out the identity of the ghost, it was just a few short sentences. The author did not explain why she failed to return. The reader is left to assume that she lost track of time and her coffee went cold.

I will not go into detail what the theme of the book is about. You can check out my review of the first book here. 

The second book has the same flaws as the first book, excruciating repetitive details of clothes, appearances and re-introduction of characters, with permanent thought bubbles above their heads. 

The method would have worked better with a play than a novel. The actors could step up to the front of the stage and whisper their thoughts to the audience.

Related topic:

Book Review: Before The Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Book Review: Before The Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

 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. 

Related topic:

Book Review: Tales From The Cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Book Review: Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

 

Outlander was first published in 1991 but I only came to know of it recently when a friend recommended the book. It is the first in the Outlander book and TV series.

Outlander is a story about time-travel romance between Claire Randall and Jamie Fraser. Claire is a military nurse who served in the World War II. When the war ended in 1945 she reunited with her husband Frank. They had married shortly before war broke out, and were separated for six years. They decided to take a second honeymoon in a village in Scotland where they were married.

It was in that village, up on a hill, where Claire was suddenly transported back in time to 18th century Scotland. There, she met and married Jamie Fraser.

That is the first issue I have with the book. Call it what you want, bigamy is still bigamy regardless of the time period. You can't argue that two hundred years ago Claire wasn't married yet. That argument is not valid because Claire wasn't even born yet at that time. However, the married Claire from year 1945 was the same person who married a second man while still being married. 

My second objection is the relationship between Claire and Jamie. Jamie is a guy who would be arrested and jailed today for domestic violence. But in the book, it was "normal" for a husband to beat his wife, and then get turned on by the beating and raped her. That is one SICK man, to say it's a normal in the 18th century is just a very poor excuse to glamourize domestic violence. 

My third grouse is that Frank, the legal husband, was not given more story-time. He was a gentle, affectionate History professor. I much preferred his personality to that of Jamie Fraser. But because the book was told only from Claire's point of view, there was no mention of a possibly distraught Frank searching for Claire. I wish the author had done a multiple points of view, I would have loved to know what went on in Frank's mind as he searched fruitlessly for Claire, and how the villagers took the disappearance of her, especially Mrs Baird, the nosy proprietor of the bed and breakfast where Claire and Frank stayed at.