Internal monologue: With rules like this I can clearly see why no one time travels. But I love my beloved too much to let it slip.) OKAY🥴 On the hillside of Mount Hakodate in northern Japan, Cafe Donna Donna is fabled for its dazzling views of Hakodate port. But that’s not all. Like the charming Tokyo cafe Funiculi Funicula, Cafe Donna Donna offers its customers the extraordinary experience of travelling through time. Treat Your Shelf: Before the Coffee gets Cold - Toshikazu Kawaguchi". The Gryphon . Retrieved 2021-09-08.

At times, it was very lovely. My very favorite things are lovely things, and simple, wonderful magical realism is my favorite hard-to-find-done-well genre, and for a while it seemed like this could qualify as being both of those things.Now, those two complaints aside... honestly, I kind of liked it. This is by no means a great novel, but I found the time travel rules fairly amusing (and frustrating, but it kind of delighted me in that regard as well). Also, I liked the character of Kazu. As a former barista I delighted in her character. A customer comes in and pisses off a ghost and gets herself cursed? Well, offer the ghost some coffee. The ghost is just an annoyance and the customer should have been focusing on the coffee and leaving the ghost alone anyway (This really is how 90% of baristas who work the night crew would act, I assure you. You did something stupid, we would note it for future stories and possibly even post a snarky sign telling customers not to do the stupid thing again). The author beautifully told us how to face the death of our loved ones in this book by convincing us to stay happy and always keep on smiling so that the person who died can see us happy from the dark box (The author compares death to a dark box in this novel) to make him/her also happy. With faces both familiar and new,the bookfollows four patrons who visit to take advantage of the cafe’s time-traveling offer and revisit moments with family, friends and lovers. In true Japanese fashion, the magic realism of the Tokyo cafe is reigned in by a strict set of protocols for returning to the past — as the coffee is poured the guests leave in a “shimmering steam”; they must not leave their allocated seat inside the cafe and can only meet those they have previously seen there, they must also return to the present before the coffee gets cold otherwise they become trapped as a ghost in the cafe. Kawaguchi wanted to impart the importance for all of us to face reality hence the heart-wrenching rule that no matter what happens or how one tries to change the past, it will not alter the present. Mechanically, from a storytelling and writing point of view, Before the Coffee Gets Cold needs a complete overhaul.

Despite a tantalizing premise the execution of time travel with ever added on new rules is sloppy. And the underlying morale of the four stories is basically highly conservative in my opinion. Terry Hong of The Christian Science Monitor stated that the "narrative is occasionally uneven and tends to meander" but that the author "has a surprising, unerring ability to find lasting emotional resonance." [11] Ian J. Battaglia of the Chicago Review of Books wrote that "despite the occasional clumsiness, the narrative is deeply moving" and that the "characters are the real stars here, and their empathy for one another is powerful." [12] Courtney Rodgers of Book Riot compared the book to American comedy series Pushing Daisies, stating that the "charming short novel asks questions about time and how we choose to spend it." [13] I have read Before the Coffee Gets Cold by this author and my feelings are still the same regarding this one. I was not a huge fan of the writing style or some of the trivial conversations in between someone sitting in the chair.In the second story a women just naturally sees herself as a nurse for her husband and is treated quite unappreciatively by him. This story did have heart and I am not going say much negative about this one.