Tales from the Cafe: Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, 2)

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And that more or less the desire that religion has been busy trying to address for the past few thousand years with the help of their own strict rules - which admittedly don't involve coffee which does seem to be a major oversight. The rules for time travel are silly; the ghost woman is absurd (though nicely fleshed-out this time); the awkward story conceits are strained and difficult to digest. I've slowly grown to really like the staff at the cafe, and the endearing and complicated reasons people want to travel to a different time. It builds on the rules and world-building established in the original, without ever stepping on its own toes.

Tales from the Cafe: Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Tales from the Cafe: Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu

As is the case with the first book, there are four heart-tugging connected stories that explore life’s challenges and delve deeply into the characters.

It is definitely a unique take on time travel that I found quite fascinating with rules that must be followed. In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. In the first book, we learn that she is cursed to sit there because, when she went back in time to meet her dead husband, she let her coffee get cold. When people get lost in their own worries, they can be blind to the feelings of those most important to them. We also discover who the enigmatic lady in the white dress is too, which added a bit of closure to some of the mysteries left open in the previous installment.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold - Wikipedia Before the Coffee Gets Cold - Wikipedia

Overall I have enjoyed the two books in this series, hopefully if there is a third book the author can just say "the rules were explained" rather than listing them out one by one every single time. As with the first book in the series, I partially listened to this as an audiobook and partially read it on the page. In this story, like in the first act of the original novel, we’re being introduced to the cafe’s workers as background noise. Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s heartwarming Tales from the Cafe, translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot, explores the age-old question: what would you do if you could travel back in time?

On the other hand I was close to crying three times while reading which had nothing to do with reading the rules for time travel repeatedly so we could say it was a very good novel in succeeding to hit the sentimental, emotional, or just plain mawkish spot. What I love about this book (and series) is that while we get a brief look into the lives of the different "travelers" in each chapter, the author does a masterful job of growing the back stories and current situations of the café workers.

Tales from the Cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi | Goodreads Tales from the Cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi | Goodreads

It gives us more of the characters we like, while introducing a few more to keep things interesting. Gotaro’s guilt has reached breaking point, and he wants to record a message from his dead friend for her to watch on her wedding day. Shuichi, the eternal optimist that he was, saw this setback as a chance, and by working two or three times as hard as everyone else he rose to become an area manager in charge of seven outlets. One was that there was nothing you could do while in the past that would change the present, no matter how hard you tried.

The reason for that is simple: if we let everyone who dies be a cause for unhappiness, that would mean people are being born to be unhappy.