I love returning to Before the Coffee Gets Cold series. There is something about the happenings at the cozy Japanese cafe that invites me back over and over again. Each book consists of four connected short stories. I love how the seasons change in each story. Here is what the third installment, Before Your Memory Fades is about:
Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Geoffrey Trousselot (Translator)
Goodreads | Before the Coffee Gets Cold # 3
The latest novel in the international bestselling Before the Coffee Gets Cold Series, following four new customers in a little Tokyo café where customers can travel back in time.
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café that 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.
From the author of Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Tales from the Cafe comes another story of four new customers, each of whom is hoping to take advantage of Café Funiculi Funicula’s time-travelling offer. Among some familiar faces from Kawaguchi’s previous novels, readers will also be introduced to a daughter, a comedian, a sister, and a lover, each with something they wish they had said differently.
With his signature heartwarming characters and immersive storytelling, Kawaguchi once again invites the reader to ask themselves: what would you change if you could travel back in time?
Content notes include depiction of grief, death, death of sibling, suicidal thoughts, burnout, depression.
Before Your Memory Fades – Review
Before Your Memory Fades picks up a decade or so after Tales from the Café. Nagare Tokita, the owner of Café Funicula Funicula, has travelled to Hakodate to oversee Café Donna Donna, which is run by Nagare’s mother, Yukari, who has taken off on an unplanned trip to America.
The Characters
It was nice to meet characters I was already familiar with – Kazu and Nagare have been constants in previous books. In Tales from the Café, I met and adored Miki, Nagare’s daughter. She is older now and is managing Café Funicula Funicula by herself in Tokyo while her father is away.
There are a number of new characters as well. Reiji is an aspiring comedian who works at the Donna Donna. Regulars to the cafe include Reiji’s friend,Nanako, and the Doctor Saki. Kazu’s daughter, Sachi, just turned seven and is the only one in the Tokita family who can now pour the coffee for travellers. Though Yukari is not physically present at the cafe, I got to learn about her style of serving time-travelling coffee and the ways in which she has built a strong clientele for her little business. Nagare is unsure about her approach of bringing people to the cafe at opportune times through cryptic messages.
The Stories
As always, death, grief and bereavement is central to all stories. Throughout the book, Sachi is obsessed with a book called What If the World Were Ending Tomorrow? One Hundred Questions, bringing the question about last deeds to the forefront of the narrative and tying all the stories together.
The four stories in the book are:
Story # 1: The Daughter
In this one, a woman whose parents died when she was a baby wishes to return to the past to tell her parents that they ruined her life by leaving her alone in the world. As the first story, it did a phenomenal job of reestablishing not just the rules of the cafe for time travel but also Reiji’s character, his approach to explaining the rules due to Yukari’s offhand approach and Kazu’s intuitive and calm demeanour while handling tough situations. I loved that this story actually had a time back in time and a travel forward in time, artfully fleshing out backstories of characters who are relevant for the following stories.
Story # 2: The comedian
This one features a famous comedian duo, PORON DORON, which consists of Hayashida and Todoroki. They have finally realized their dream of winning the most prestigious comedy award in the country but ever since the announcement, Todoroki has disappeared. Hayashida speculates that Todoroki might come to the cafe to see his wife who died five years ago. Having won the award she had supported and believed in him to achieve, he may no longer have the will to live. This was a heartwarming story and I loved the meeting between Todoroki and Setsuko.
Story # 3: The Sister
Yukika and Reiko were quite close as sisters since their parents passed away at a young age. Yukika worked at the cafe before her illness and passing. Reiko has been struggling with her death. This is maybe the saddest story of the three. It highlights how losing someone can be the loss of ourselves and how to find our way back to happiness again.
Story # 4: The Young Man
Two friends who have grown up together do not realize they have feelings for each other until it is too late. I liked that this story looked at the difficulty of confessing love and the challenges of moving on.
Three Quotes
“That something was the hesitation of someone about to meet their…deceased sister, deceased friend, deceased mother or deceased wife.
The more precious those feelings, the stronger the sense of disorientation. The reason for that was sim-ple. You can reverse time and meet the person you most dearly love, but you cannot reverse death. That was the rule. No matter how hard you try, you cannot change the present. ”
Before Your Memory Fades
“Inside every person is an inherent capability to make it through any kind of difficulty. Everyone has that energy. But sometimes when that energy flows via our anxiety valve, the flow can be restricted. The greater that anxiety, the greater the strength needed to open the valve and release the energy.
That strength is empowered by hope. You could say that hope is the power to believe in the future.”
Before Your Memory Fades
“If it were just a matter of traveling back to the past, anyone could do it. But this cafe chooses people…by its rules. and some people hear those rules and give up. But those people who are resolved to go back, despite the rules, have a reason for doing so. It doesn’t matter what that reason is. If there is someone they must see, or someone they should see… even if the present reality won’t change…then, that’s all that matters.”
Before Your Memory Fades
Notes
I don’t remember previous books going into topics like burnout and depression in explicit terms. Before Your Memory Fades had paragraphs dedicated to them. By contrast, there were a few characters who were killed off by rare diseases or had fairly little time to live once they found out the diagnosis. I found this not realistic of real life but it begs the question about the kind of people who would gravitate towards the cafe that allows them to travel back in time. Maybe it does make sense for the setting.
I was also a little annoyed by the number of huh, uh-huh in the dialogue but they serve their conversation purpose too.
I love this series! The cozy setting, the pace of cafe life and the conversations that take place there are always a highlight for me. I am looking forward to returning to book 4, Before We Say Goodbye. Book 5, Before We Forget Kindness has been released in English at time of writing this and Book 6 is available in Japanese.
Have you read Before Your Memory Fades or others in the series? Check them out on Goodreads.
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