So how does Kawaguchi differ from the others? Does he get away with recycling a hackneyed literary (and cinematic) gimmick? To his credit, Kawaguchi is a canny enough craftsman to give the cliché a healthy spin. (Oh, and let’s not forget that successful film franchise the Back to the Future trilogy, starring Michael J. Like the knockoff Rolexes I saw being hawked in Roppongi, Kawaguchi stands on the shoulders of numerous scribblers who have exploited Wells’s scenerio in stage plays, radio programs, comic books, and in popular films like Timecop, starring the “Muscles from Brussels” kickboxer Jean-Claude Van Damme. Wells first developed the theme in his novel/socialist polemic The Time Machine. Turn back the dial of the Wayback Machine to the year 1895 (you remember that contraption from the animated cartoon Rocky and Bulwinkle show, don’t you?). Of course, Kawaguchi is not the first writer to enable time tripping by way of some sort of phantasmagorical vehicle. The larger world enters only when we learn their backstories. The magical coffee shop, with its shabby interior, serves as a stage through which his characters must pass into another dimension. This is his first novel, and understandably it draws on his dramatic skills. Kawaguchi, at the age of 49, is best known in Japan for his plays and collaborations with a theater troupe called Sonic Snail. Mesmerized, I could have been mistaken for one of the starry-eyed characters in search of a human connection that populate Kawaguchi’s novel. I passed numerous rabuho (love hotels) and broom closet–sized stalls where everything from live crickets and ducklings to knockoff Rolexes were sold.

My ramble, in the Roppongi district, was an attempt to lose my jet lag. I, too, wandered down a labyrinthine alley like the one described in Kawaguchi’s book. Reading Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s novel - set in a magical basement shop on a narrow Tokyo lane where one orders a cup of coffee and is transported back in time - I remembered my visit to Tokyo some years ago. Translated from the Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot. To his credit, Kawaguchi is a canny enough craftsman to give the time-tripping cliché a healthy spin.īefore the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi.

Before the coffee get cold