Time Travel as a Way To Talk About Pain
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s ‘Before the Coffee Gets Cold’
Kawaguchi’s novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold (2019) has recently taken social media by storm. Everybody is raving about it, ranting about it — leaving reviews left and right. While literature and films are not foreign to the concept of time travel, Kawaguchi adds a twist to his novel that changes the way his readers will come to think and talk about it: “when you go back, no matter how hard you try, the present won’t change.”
Forget Christopher Nolan’s groundbreaking Tenet (though not strictly time travel) or Marvel’s epic Avengers: Endgame. Time bows to no one, and Kawaguchi understood that more than anybody. In any case, what readers will take from this novel is not the action and desperation that comes with a burning desire to change the past (therefore the present). It is merely the slow contemplation of what it means to be given a chance to confront pain without being able to absolve yourself from its shackles.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold centres around four people who are brought together in a small coffee shop in Japan: a lover, a mother, a wife and a sister. Each of them seeks to change the past in their different ways, and soon come to find out that the very coffee shop they are sitting in offers an opportunity go visit the past or future. But here’s the twist: there are rules. There are always rules:
- You must not leave your seat in the coffee shop
- You can meet only those who have been in the cafe
- You must return before the coffee gets cold
- Nothing you do will change the present
These rules impose four restrictions, in which everyone who desires to travel in time is limited by space, choice, time limit, and capabilities. Again and again, these rules are stated, but it imposes a strong understanding in the reader that nothing anyone does in a different time will ever change things.
The characters then share a twinkle of a thought with its reader: what’s the point, then?
But Before the Coffee Gets Cold reads much more like a collection of short stories, and introspection of life of four vastly different people with metrically opposing intentions, than it is a novel packed with plot and action. The book, above all, offers its reader a way to confront pain that life inevitably throws at us.
Being limited on practically every front, each four characters’ travel to the past or future consists of them sitting in front of the person they wish to meet, saying something they wish they have or could say, and then promptly drinking their coffee before it gets cold, returning them to their rightful timeline.
It may not seem like much, but in the span of five minutes, all four protaganist manages to do what they set out to do: talk to pain. Not pain in the literal sense, but the four people that have caused them an immense sorrow they feel in present day, though not always intentionally. The lover meets the boyfriend who dumped her, the mother meets the daughter she died to give birth to, the lover meets her husband with alzheimers who has now forgotten her, and finally, the sister meets her sibling on the day before her fatal accident. Nothing changes because of their brief exchange. The present, the past, and the future remains untouched. But everything has changed because they were offered the chance to talk to the person they otherwise cannot in present day.
The only way to treat pain is to confront it, not to change it, not to shape it into a mould that fits into what is comfortable for us. Pain is big and imposing, and the only way you can live with it, is to sit across it, tied down to your chair, to the person who caused you most pain — and talk to it.
We might not be able to time travel, but we certainly may be comforted by the fact that even if we could, the present won’t change. Kawaguchi tells us not to try to absolve pain by hopelessly wishing we had done something different. He doesn’t tell us how to deal with pain, nobody can, only that it can be dealt with and resolved, and the way through it does not require a dramatic shift in the physical alignments of our universe. And that, I think, is absolutely liberating.
I write this article acutely aware of my internal struggle with the novel. On one hand, I do think it offered me a new perspective on the restrictions of time travel as a reflection of how we must deal with pain in a time travel-less world. On the other hand, I am aware of a certain misogyny that underlies the novel.
Not only are all the travellers plagued with regret women, but all eventually makes a sacrifice. The lover waits three years for her boyfriend, the mother gives her life away for her daughter, the sister sacrifices her succesful business to return to her family, and the wife lives contentedly as a nurse for her husband.
I bear that in mind, but I also bear in mind a valuable outlook I took away from Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold. While one does not cancel the other out, I find from this novel that it is important that one can read a book without liking it, without agreeing with it; only to take from it what matters.
I am unhappy about some aspects of the novel, and happy about others. But I do not need to be only one.
