55 pages • 1 hour read
Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Transl. Geoffrey TrousselotBefore the Coffee Gets Cold
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Constraints of Time Travel
The constraints of time travel are crucial to the characters’ experiences in the café. The strict rules that govern their journeys to the past and future limit the kind of experiences they can have and yet do not prohibit the experience of changing one’s outlook on life for the better.
The most instinctive reason for wanting to travel back in time would be to go back and change the situations and conversations that have led to an unsatisfactory present. This is café newcomer Fumiko’s hope when she initially learns about the time travel seat, as she hopes to go back to the conversation with her boyfriend and persuade him to stay with her instead of going to America. However, Kazu informs her that even if she goes back in time and tells Goro her feelings, the present will remain unchanged. At first, a crestfallen Fumiko thinks that not being able to change the present “defeats the purpose” of going back and that this rule contradicts the time travel stories she already knows (12). Ultimately, she chooses to time travel anyway.
Fumiko’s sentiment is shared by a magazine article about the café with the polemic title “Uncovering Truth Behind ‘Time-Traveling Café’ Made Famous by Urban Legend” (14). The article attempts to expose the café as a hoax, especially when the café staff can give no comment about why traveling to the past leaves the future unchanged. The article writer concludes that “the sticky point of not being able to change the present certainly [makes] the whole idea seem pointless” (14). Kawaguchi employs the magazine article as a means of addressing the dissatisfaction with this rule and forcing each potential time traveler to contend with the question of whether time travel is worth it if the present remains unchanged.
The article writer claims that they have not met any time travelers at the café. Even so, Fumiko, Kohtake, Hirai, and Kei each decide that it is worth going. Fumiko decides that “all she [wants] to do [is] to go back and see” and that “her heart [is] set on experiencing this fantastical phenomenon” (22). The other time travelers share her wish for emotional reckoning and her desire to convey an urgent message to a loved one. With the opportunity to change their own circumstances out of the picture, the time travelers give up their wishes for personally satisfying resolutions and instead focus on improving their relationships with their loved ones. This aligns with the novel’s theme of From Individualism to Unity.
While time travel could ostensibly be unlimited, Kawaguchi prevents such unwieldiness by imposing strict rules. Travelers can only go to meet someone who has been (or will be) in the café at a specific time. This emerged from the narrative’s dramatic origins, as it is far more efficient to be able to set the scenes in a play in a single locale. It also cements the café at the center of the characters’ most important interactions. Moreover, the rule bonds the time travelers, who are often witnesses to each other’s journeys and emotional transformations. The article writer disparages the rule of the unchanging present, assuming that no one would bother traveling through time without personal gain to be had. However, the changes of heart within the time travelers in the novel imply a sense of shared secrecy. Because the journeys are so emotional and personal, the travelers closely guard the details rather than sharing them in magazine interviews.
The final condition of time travel, which is to drink the coffee before it gets cold or risk replacing the ghost woman who is trapped in the seat, adds an element of jeopardy to the whole process. At first, Fumiko thinks that “there are probably no pluses, but there are no minuses either” to time travel, but “turning into a ghost […] is a definite minus” (44). Symbolically, refusing or forgetting to drink the coffee before it gets cold indicates the unhealthy sense of losing oneself in a different time (typically the past). Those who do so cannot use the experience to contribute towards a better future. Each time traveler notices the coffee cooling at a faster rate after they make a real connection with their loved one. Not only does this heighten dramatic tension, it refers to the subjective experience of time moving quicker when people are happy or immersed in an activity. Wanting to linger behind with one’s loved one is presented as a selfish, solipsistic wish. Hirai, for instance, wants to stay in the past with the memory of her sister Kumi instead of facing Kumi’s death. Kei reminds her of her duty to drink the coffee and return to the present so she can fulfill Kumi’s wish of returning to the inn. It would do no good to Hirai’s elderly parents to have one daughter dead and the other stuck as a ghost in a café chair. The coffee temperature rule forces the characters to live in the present and build towards the future rather than being stuck in a wishful past.
From Individualism to Unity
Each part of the novel concentrates on a different character’s personal time-traveling adventure. They are titled by a particular two-person relationship, for example, “The Lovers” or “Mother and Child.” However, no one’s time travel story is treated in isolation, as the café’s usual activities—comings and goings, eavesdropping, and so on—continue alongside the time traveler’s experience. This does not only comprise the naturalistic experience of being in a café, where one is simultaneously immersed in oneself and aware of others around them, but allows Kawaguchi to plant important plot points ahead of time and show how the characters’ experiences are interconnected. Kumi’s appearance in the café at the start of Part 2, Kohtake and Fusagi’s story, enables both Kei and the reader to get to know Hirai’s younger sister, who will be dead in Part 3. Kumi’s appearance adds details to her character that make her real: Her enthusiasm as she writes her letter to Hirai, her physical appearance, and her enormous food order all work together to build a distinct person that Hirai can then mourn. Without these details, Hirai’s grief has less impact, and her journey is less compelling. Moreover, owing to The Constraints of Time Travel, Kumi must appear in the café if Hirai is to be able to go back in time to visit her.
Kei is a third party who is instrumental in the sisters’ relationship. She tries to discern what Kumi is writing and helps Kumi attempt to deliver her letter to Hirai. She continues her role of messenger even after Hirai’s trip to the past, as she insists that Hirai must fulfill her promise to Kumi and return to take over her family’s inn. This shows how the café’s characters influence each other’s growth into better, more socially responsible citizens.
The theme of moving from serving the individual to the collective relates to the background topic of Familial Duty in Japanese Culture. While Hirai’s story is the starkest example of learning to sacrifice personal wishes for familial responsibility, each story embodies an element of moving away from selfish desires. For example, Kohtake wants to re-experience a past where her husband has not forgotten her and read his love letter to her. Her visit to the past forces a bittersweet acceptance of the present as she realizes that Fusagi is trying to remember her through his travel magazines. Inevitably, he will forget that his nurse Kohtake is his wife Mrs. Fusagi. After time traveling, Kohtake overcomes her hurt and chooses to embrace the present Fusagi, looking at the magazines with him and taking on the burden of reminding him they have traveled together.
Go-getting businesswoman Fumiko also wants to time travel in the interests of romantic love. Like the others, her initial desires are self-focused; she wants to salvage her relationship with Goro, and only learns compassion and patience after traveling to the past. Even in Part 4, Kei’s story, Fumiko is the one who initially brings up the topic of future travel, as she wants to know if she and Goro really do get married in three years. This implies that Fumiko still has some impatience and selfishness within her. However, the news of Kei’s pregnancy—and her slim chance of surviving it—makes Kei’s visit to the future more important. Fumiko sacrifices her own wish when she allows Kei to take up the seat instead of her. In the future, she and Goro give up their career dreams to help run the café and raise Kei’s child, Miki, indicating that both Fumiko and Goro have grown less individualistic.
Kei, who has had to live a limited life peppered by hospital visits, represents the heart of this theme. She embodies the virtues of compassion, service to others, and the “talent for living happily” (74). All of Kei’s virtues put the collective good above her own wishes. Her only “selfish” act is going to the future to meet her potential child; even that journey, however, leads to a greater act of self-sacrifice, as Kei chooses to have her baby at the cost of her own life. At the end of the novel, when the other characters gather to look after Miki after she has died, they live out Kei’s example. On a further level, this aligns with the nature of the café, which is a place of service, refreshment, and personal growth.
Gender, Restraint, and Emotion
Men and women occupy distinct roles in the novel, reflecting the patriarchal and gender-polarizing aspects of Japanese society.
Interestingly, all four time travelers are women, and the novel’s third-person perspective invests the most time in their feelings and experiences. On one hand, this is an empowering position as it is the time travelers’ changes of heart that enable a better understanding of the past and promote a better future. Additionally, in Parts 3 and 4, the focal relationships are between two women—sisters in Hirai’s case and mother and daughter in Kei’s. This, in addition to the demotion of romantic love in favor of compassionate responsibility in Parts 1 and 2, promotes the view that women’s experiences are important regardless of whether men are involved. On the other hand, the implication that women should be the ones to seek and experience the emotional changes that time travel offers suggests that women must adapt and conform. Both Fumiko and Hirai are portrayed as happier for giving up their individual pursuits in favor of more socially accepted roles.
Kei is portrayed as a model woman whom the other time travelers should emulate. Kei makes the ultimate feminine sacrifice in becoming a mother despite the cost to her life and takes compassionate interest in others’ well-being. Following her example, Fumiko and Hirai set aside their individualistic identities to become feminine givers. Even Kohtake, who is already a nurse for her husband, learns greater empathy and self-sacrifice. Though Fusagi offers to divorce her so she does not have to stay married to a man who cannot remember her, Kohtake chooses to stay with him. Fumiko and Hirai exchange their more masculine pride and ambition to serve the collective—the café, for Fumiko, and the family inn, for Hirai—while Kohtake follows Kei’s example and learns to find joy in her situation with Fusagi. These are not inherently negative conclusions; however, they do align very closely with the gendered expectations prominent in Japanese society.
Even Kei experiences a transformation after time travel. She learns that “the most important thing” is not that she will be absent from her child’s upbringing (212) but that her child will grow up surrounded by the love of others. This inspires her to go through with the birth and sacrifice her own life for her future daughter’s. This philosophy of self-effacement fits with the core theme of From Individualism to Unity, but it also supports the expectation that women should be self-sacrificing and that their individual desires must be subdued.
The only departure from this is Kazu, who remains controlled and enigmatic as “her own feelings” do not form “part of the filter through which she [interacts] with the world” (189). She sees things more objectively than others and does not empathize with the café’s visitors. Unlike the other women who foster relationships, Kazu purposefully tries not to influence people and events by “keeping herself at a safe distance” (189). Her reserved, elusive nature aligns with The Constraints of Time Travel, as it is her job to contain the limits of the experience. However, an element of subjectivity leaks through when she encourages Kei to time travel and even “[smiles] warmly” to assure her that she will meet her future child (191). Kazu also smiles when Fumiko learns her lesson. This indicates that her happiness rests with good entering into the world, like a goddess who smiles when mortals behave well.
The men in the novel are characterized by restraint and reservations, as they find it difficult to express feelings or vulnerability. This is especially the case with Goro and Fusagi. Both men are static figures who are unable to communicate well owing to insecurity. Goro, who is self-conscious about his burn scar and the disparity between his and Fumiko’s attractiveness, never declares his love or proposes to Fumiko. Before his Alzheimer’s, Fusagi was self-conscious of his inability to read and write; his diagnosis later made him doubt his worthiness as Kohtake’s husband. In both cases, these men’s partners use time travel to act against a culture that encourages men to hide their vulnerability. The women are able to look again at their reserved behavior and see that their partners are acting out of insecurity rather than indifference. This helps them achieve meaningful communication. When Kohtake travels back in time, she is able to witness Fusagi’s sadness and love for her in subtle bodily gestures, such as when “his shoulders [appear] to be trembling ever so slightly” which suggests that he has been crying (103). Fusagi keeps his tears a private affair, as befits the gender expectations of Japanese society.
Café owner Nagare has an imposing demeanor. He realizes that he may be intimidating to the innocent 15-year-old girl (later revealed as his future daughter). However, even at 17, his wife Kei was able to see his virtues and declare “clearly and directly” that she wanted to marry him (177). Once again, a woman’s emotional flexibility breaks through male restraint.
Though the men may be more restrained than the women, they also move From Individualism to Unity as their actions are generous and contribute towards the collective good. Even though Fusagi and Goro love and revere their partners, they give them the option to leave the relationship, thus intending to put their partners’ wishes before their own. Fusagi thinks Kohtake deserves a husband who can remember her, while Goro believes Fumiko will someday want a partner as beautiful as she. Moreover, Fusagi’s act of looking at gardens in travel magazines is a loving gesture because he is looking at places he has visited with Kohtake in the past. Goro gives up his dream of working in video games to run the café with Fumiko, a sacrifice akin to Hirai’s. Kawaguchi implies that while gaining perspective through time travel and showing emotion is one way of doing good, choosing the right action is another way. Thus, despite their different roles in the novel, both women and men are united in their creation of a better world.
