Before Your Memory Fades by Toshikazu Kawaguchi Book Review
Japanese books carry a world in themselves. There is something about Japanese fiction that is so alluring and other-worldly. The language is used in such a manner that seemingly banal realities of everyday life begin to appear surreal and magnificent. Such is the beauty of Japanese fiction. Although I read all these books in English translation but I am assuming that the translation stays as true to the text as possible.
‘Before Your Memory Fades by Toshikazu Kawaguchi holds forth that legacy. The theme is rather science fictionisque, the novel is set in a time-traveling cafe. To an outsider, it seems like an ordinary touristy cafe in a small town in Japan. But this cafe lets people travel both into the past and the future. To be precise, there is a special chair and once you are seated on that chair and begin to drink coffee poured to you in a specific way by a specific member of a Japanese clan, you can travel back to your past. But there are many conditions attached. You along with the person from the past you wish to meet must have visited this cafe previously for this experiment to be successful. Also, you can visit the past, but you cannot undo any actions to change the present. To top it all, while you are in the past, you must drink all the coffee before it gets cold, otherwise, you stay stuck in past and become a ghost!
‘Before Your Memory Fades’ is a delightfully whimsical novel that can get a bit macabre at times. Each chapter brings the story of a character who uses the special service of this cafe to go down memory lane. You get to know about their life as well as the lives of those they visit. People use this service to mostly visit dead people. All this talk about memories, ghosts, and people expressing their regrets to dead people from the past they meet in a cafe can be a bit spooky and unsettling. But the writer balances it out with an adequate dose of humor and light-hearted moments. You get to hear the life stories of the people who work at the cafe, their dreams and aspirations, and also how they feel about this whole time-traveling business.
‘Before Your Memory Fades’ turns the whole metaphor of a cafe upside down. In the popular imagination, a cafe is a place for escape and relaxation. It’s our escape den, a place where we go to have a good time and have a casual banter with others. But in this book, a cafe becomes a place where people come to face their demons from the past. The little Japanese cafe opens up all their past wounds, and there is a complex and painful catharsis and self-conflict before they can finally reconcile with their past. In a way then, the cafe becomes a form of therapy. People who come to visit their past are often wounded, perturbed and agitated. Visiting their loved ones from the past doesn’t bring them back but it does bring a certain kind of closure to a hitherto unresolved situation.
The overall vibes I get from ‘Before Your Memory Fades’ are very positive. The novel doesn’t offer any romanticization of reality. When you are ardently hoping that something sad won’t happen, the sad thing happens, bringing you face-to-face with the realities of life. But the words give you courage and determination and make you reconcile with your own painful past just as the characters emerge out of the shadows of their painful past as they exit the cafe.
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