Iran reads
‘Before the Coffee Gets Cold’ by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
“Water flows from high places to low places. That is the nature of gravity. Emotions also seem to act according to gravity. When in the presence of someone with whom you have a bond, and to whom you have entrusted your feelings, it is hard to lie and get away with it. The truth just wants to come flowing out. This is especially the case when you are trying to hide your sadness or vulnerability. It is much easier to conceal sadness from a stranger, or from someone you don’t trust.”
One of Iran’s more successful books in terms of sale this week is ‘Before the Coffee Gets Cold’, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s novel with the tantalizing premise of What would you change if you could go back in time?
Originally published in 2015, the 51-year old Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
These intriguing questions woven into an emotionally resonant plot are perhaps the reason for the book’s popularity among the readers who want to grapple with such ponderings.
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.
In ‘Before the Coffee Gets Cold’, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer’s, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.
But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold.