Review 'Before the Coffee Gets Cold' by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

At some point in life, you might find yourself confronted with flashbacks to a moment you remained silent when you should've spoken up: putting aside your pride, asking someone to stay, tell someone it's okay they'll forgot your name and won't recall your face, apologise for the mistakes you made and the unfortunate chain of events that were set into motion because of your doing.

Sometimes you wish you had cherished the final moment you didn't know you were having with a person now lost to you.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Japanese author Toshikazu Kawaguchi deals with this fascination: if you could go back in time to relive a missed opportunity, would you do it and what would you say or do? In a small café in Tokyo, which seemingly froze in time during the Edo period, one special chair allows its user to transport to a specific moment in the past.

I'm usually skeptical when stories involve time travelling as it's often too easy to find paradoxes and plot holes. However, the rules for time travelling in Kawaguchi's novel are so intricate that it might convince even the staunchest of disbelievers that maybe it could work. There's one seat in the café and that's the only seat that allows you to time travel. While in the past, you have to stay seated in said chair. The person you want to see must've visited the café. Whatever you do in the past will in no way whatsoever affect the future.

And, most importantly, you have to drink the coffee before it gets cold, or else...

Kawagucki's novel is divided into four chapters – or perhaps it would be better to refer to them as acts. The author first wrote Before the Coffee Gets Cold as a play, and it's important for readers to keep in mind that the novel is an adaptation. The theatricality of the characters, their emotions and their dramatic responses to what's happening around them, seems at times over-done and probably works better when performed on stage. Although this is in no way a true shortcoming, it might demand some adjustment on the part of the reader.

The novel, in which nothing is what it seems, opens up slowly and comes to its full blossom in the final act when initital side characters have turned into main ones. With great care, the story slowly excavates their lives and lays their mysteries bare. Indeed, rather than plot driving the story forward, Before the Coffee Gets Cold is character-driven: it relies on character and emotional response for its progress. This makes it hard not to imagine yourself in the characters' shoes (it took me a great deal of restraint to not yell at the pages to 'just drink the coffee!').

This character-driven novel might be slow-paced, but it never makes the reader want the story to move faster. After all, fleeting moments in life should take time and careful consideration, because we don't have the luxury of returning to the past in the hopes to relive missed moments and opportunities. I even had to take a small break after every act because each ending left such a deep impression!

Before the Coffee Gets Cold is perhaps best described as a magic mystery novel. Rather than the hustle and bustle of Tokyo, readers find themselves in a back alley on windowless basement level, a place which, if you're not actually travelling to the past, makes you at least forget about the present for a while.

The experience of reading Kawaguchi's highly atmospheric and somewhat eerie novel came with all sorts of feelings: regret, nostalgia, entertainment, heart-ache, sadness, happiness, relief. If you like a little bit of sad, beautiful, dark mystery that haunts you for days after finishing the final page, Before the Coffee Gets Cold certainly is a great choice for you.

Review Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square (excerpt)

I am the kind of person who starts shopping for Christmas presents in the summer months, someone who doesn’t shun away from singing cheerful carols about a Christmas Tree Farm and mulled wine when others are at the beach getting their tan on with a piña colada in their hand. Admittedly, I can be quite obnoxious about my love for 25 December.

But then there’s the likes of the Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square (1941) main character, who describes the season to be jolly, that ‘shut, shuttered, super-Sunday—the Christmas Holiday’, not as something he dislikes, but something he detests. The sight of the empty, bleak streets reinforces the feeling that this hungover Grinch can’t wait for the day to end. There’s only one group of people who are lucky during Christmas: those who get to work. Thankfully, the pubs are opened on regular hours! There is some comfort and relief in that idea, it appears; that not the sight of Christmas tree lights or the lights dangling above Regent Street bring relief but rather the light shining from these alcohol-filled hearts of England.

There is some normality left in the midst of the Christmas absurdity!

The description of the street, deserted and dreary, on a day which people tend to associate with light and joy cannot but make the reader wonder: what happened to you that you can’t wait to sleep your way through this day that is supposed to make us feel warm and cosy?

As he enters a ‘little’ hotel (why is he staying alone in a hotel on Christmas anyway?), the speaker notices the Christmas lights, and somehow that puts a damper on the previous joy that the pubs, having stayed their normal self and thus bringing comfort on this joyless day that is Christmas, gave. Even here, this place of previous comfort, the Christmas spirit has found its way in. There is no escaping it, and the main character makes it all too clear that he’s not happy about it.

Nor is he happy about the children playing blow-football. This passage does an extraordinary job in building character and story. Here we have a person who loathes Christmas because he is bitter about something connected to the holidays. Perhaps Christmas, more than any other day of the year, reminds him of just how lonely he is? In any case, he avoids all human contact; every hint of cosiness and warmth is to him a disturbance, an annoyance.

Like Charles Dickens’s Scrooge from A Christmas Carol, the main character is introverted. He doesn’t know anyone in the hotel, and he doesn’t intend to invest time in trying to get to know someone. He waits in his small room on the top floor until he is certain that he can enjoy his breakfast in solitude. The only human contact this person has is with the porter, who is described as both ‘obviously a cheerful man by nature’ as well as ‘gloomy’.

Well, maybe the porter is depressed because he has to work on Christmas day?

Though, the main character would consider the porter in fact one of the elect...

The speaker calls the hotel he is staying at a ‘large glorified boarding-house’; there is nothing special about it but, rather, it feigns being elevated. In a similar way, Christmas brings only shallow joy in the hearts of people; Christmas is all pretence. Like an alcoholic beverage that seems fun at first but, when drunken too much, hurts the user the next morning. Thus, hangover square.

One jug. One basin. The hotel room he is staying in is rather unwelcoming, too, which adds to the image of the person’s apparent wretchedness. It’s as basic as hotel rooms can get. The light is pink because of the ‘fly-blown bulb’. Meaning, the lamp is contaminated because of flies and their eggs having been in contact with the bulb. Not only is the room furnished in the most simple manner, it is also unpleasantly dirty.

Are we pitying this man yet?

The man polishes his shoes with a ‘polish-smeared pad he had got from Woolworth’s’, a five-and-dime store. Thus, he’s staying in a sleazy hotel on Christmas Day, and uses cheap shoe polish…in other words, the dead flies in the lamp are probably better off than this man as he has clearly hit rock-bottom. At least he has a tweed overcoat and a hat (the latter of which he decides not to wear), right?

In a relative brief passage, the extract impressively manages to raise a great deal of questions, one of which is: where is this man, who seems to have no-one in this world, going? It invites the reader to continue reading, to stick with the character. We feel sorry for this person because we can imagine how horrible it must be to be alone on Christmas. It makes the reader want to stick with him as at least that way he has someone to keep him company. Also, in the light of previous descriptions it seems a miracle that this Einzelgänger even leaves his comfortable hotel room at all. So where is he going?

He turns into Earl’s Court Road, a street in Kensington, London. In the light of when the novel was written (during World War II, that is) this bit of information might be crucial: the man is staying in the Danzig Corridor (i.e. the Polish Corridor), which was the nickname given to Earl Court Road as a consequence of the large number of Polish immigrants settling in this area. This may be an indirect hint to the main character’s background which may play an important role in the novel.

Should he go for a drink (alcohol is on this man’s mind a lot)? He considers it, but decides not to as it may lead to him missing her. Here the conflict is introduced: apparently the man is miserable because of something that happened between him and a woman. And then, he decides that it may be a good idea to go to Cromwell Road, where this mysterious woman lives (which, frankly, defies the purpose of avoiding a pub because he might miss her too much). Also, how does the man know that this lady usually doesn’t leave home until half past seven? This is where, as a reader, you might want to start feeling uncomfortable. Has he been living with her for such a great length of time that he has become familiar with her day-to-day movements? It is suggested that these two have had a rugged history.

There is a hint of desperation here, too, as the man prays that he can walk into her flat without any obtrusion. Rather than pitying this man, the reader may become worried (because, obviously, it is curious when someone wishes to walk into another person's home without them knowing it). He further feels 'curiously numb' about meeting this girl (maybe because he did not ring her first to ask if it would be alright for him to drop by?).

As he walks in, there is again a reference to light and darkness. The passage he walks in is dark; yet, there is light coming from the landing on the first floor. There is still light; but rather than coming from a pub, the source of it is her apartment, the door to which so happens to be slightly open ('ajar'). And through the sitting-room door, which is also ajar, he sees one man named Peter, who does not seem to be very fond of our speaker.

The use and description of the various locales in combination with the emotional aspect of both loneliness and bitterness builds up the tension superbly so that the reader is invited to keep on turning the pages, or to be drawn into the light like a fly mesmerised.

All in all, the passage excels in the way it sets the tone and mood of the story, in how it builds up character and conflict, and how it produces the action. First, it emphasises the feelings of gloominess by relating the deserted streets to the main character’s seemingly lonely situation. Further, he stays on his own in a cheerless hotel. To make matters worse, it is continuously emphasised that it is Christmas day, a day when feelings of loneliness could be experienced even more profoundly for the already Lonely. What’s more, these deserted streets lead the man back to the girl’s house and it becomes apparent that the history of the girl, Peter, and the main character is entangled in some way.

At this point, the reader may have mixed feelings about the main character: first, you may feel so sorry for him that you want to invite him over for mince pies, turkey, and mulled wine at your place. But then again, he may just walk in uninvited...