Coffee Magic

“The coffee served at the café was made from mocha beans grown in Ethiopia, which have a distinct aroma. But it didn’t appeal to everybody’s tastes—though deliciously aromatic, some found its bitter fruitiness and complex overtones a little overbearing. On Nagare’s insistence, the café only served mocha.” (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, p. 67)

“When Nagare made coffee, he usually brewed it using the siphon method, by pouring boiling water into a flask, then heating it to allow the evaporated steam to rise through a funnel and extract the coffee from the ground beans held inside the funnel. However, when he made coffee for Kohtake and some other regular customers, he brewed the coffee hand-drip style. When making hand-drip coffee, he put a paper filter in a dripper, added the ground beans, and poured boiling water over them. He thought the hand-drip style of making coffee allowed for greater flexibility as you could change the bitterness and sourness of the coffee by changing the temperature of the water, and the way you poured it. As the café did not play background music, it was possible to hear the soft sound of the coffee dripping, drop by drop, into the server.” (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, p. 122)

In the wildly popular Japanese novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold (published in Japanese 2015, in English 2019), Nagare, the proprietor of a small urban cafe called Funiculi Funicula, is temperamental about just how he brews coffee for his customers — as the above passages explain. Author Toshikazu Kawaguchi must love drinking coffee, I think, as the descriptions are so precise and tempting.

Nagare’s coffee not only pleases drinkers with its distinctive favor, it also enables them to travel magically forward or backward in time while sipping a fresh cup from one of his carafes. This time travel has several restrictions. For one thing, the patron must sit in a particular location in the cafe — a spot that’s normally occupied by the ghost of a woman dressed in a white summer dress, who drinks coffee endlessly while reading a novel. She leaves the seat only once per day to go to the bathroom so the person wishing to visit another time must wait patiently. Forcing her to move is not an option. 

Further, one’s brief time spent in the past or in the future is limited: one must remain in that precise seat, and stay only while one’s coffee is hot. The time traveler must choose the right moment to visit in order to find a particular person of interest who would have been there while the coffee is getting cold.

Knowing that you can go into the past usually invokes the desire to alter something that you regret. However, the time travel at Funiculi Funicula doesn’t enable you to change the present: explicitly you can’t do that. Each story in the novel concerns a person who has painful reasons to wish they could change something about their lives and relationships. Each one believes they can spend a few moments in the cafe at an earlier (or later) time, even years before or after the present, and that they can resolve some issue with a person who was there. Each time-traveler learns a lesson about human relations and the human condition, and comes out with deepened understanding despite having changed nothing in a literal sense.

These stories are sad, sentimental, and a little cloying. I find that the insights that the stories provide to the time travelers are somewhat adolescent and didactic. Each character’s discovery underscores that you can’t change the past, but you can appreciate and comprehend it, but it’s a little superficial or maybe too predictable. I kind of liked the book, but in the end I felt as if I had been patronized or maybe manipulated by a very skilled hand at telling tale with a moral lesson. I’m glad I read this one, but I don’t think I’ll read the sequels, and I don’t particularly want to see the movie.

Scene from the Japanese movie of the book, which is titled “Café Funiculi Funicula.” (IMDB) 

Review © 2024 mae sander