“In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe 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.”
So reads the blurb from Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s first book Before the Coffee Gets Cold, a slim novel that started life as a Japanese play before becoming a book that has sold millions of copies around the world and spawned an entire four – soon to be five – part series.
Here in New Zealand, it stayed at the top of best-seller lists for months on end.
Writer Kawaguchi appears at the Auckland Writers Festival this week to talk about why he thinks the Tokyo time-travel series has been so phenomenally popular. Ahead of his visit, he spoke with listener.co.nz.
Can you tell us about how you became a writer?
Becoming a Manga [Japanese comics or graphic novels] artist was my childhood dream. I love Manga and still read a lot of them. After graduating from high school, I challenged a lot of things to become a Manga artist, but it was just really hard, so I had to resign my childhood dream.
When I was 22, a friend asked me to join his theatre projects, where I started to write scripts for plays. The first performance of Before the Coffee Gets Cold was in March 2010. Ruriko Ikeda, who became my editor, saw a performance in February 2011 and asked if I could adapt the story into a novel.
I never thought about writing a novel until then, but Ruriko’s enthusiasm to “turn this story into a novel and deliver it into as many people as possible” pushed me to make my debut as an author.
What memorable experiences or challenges from your life, especially your early life, and work have shaped your perspective as a writer and director?
The theme of all the works I have written so far is “the power of life”. This is due to the influence of my mother. My father passed away when I was in the third grade of elementary school. On the night of my dad’s funeral, my mom made me and my two brothers fresh juice with a smile on her face.
Any painful reality can change depending on how we perceive it. This is what Kazu Tokita, the character in Before the Coffee Gets Cold, expresses at the end of the story: “Even if reality doesn’t change, but if our souls can change, then this chair (life) surely has an important meaning.”
My mom taught her sons to look forward with hope even in difficult times by showing us how to smile. Live with a smile. This is the underlying theme of my work.
What insights into the process of combining theatre and literature in your work can you share?
Oh, this is a difficult question. I believe that the most important thing in creative writing is to “write as you are”. This is what my editor, Ruriko Ikeda, told me when I was writing my first novel. She also said, “It doesn’t matter if you are not good at writing. Please write in your own words. That will become the style and the uniqueness of the novelist Toshikazu Kawaguchi.”
So I happened to combine theatre and literature, but I believe that the possibilities are endless, perhaps even film and literature, or restaurants and literature, or teachers and literature, and so on.
That is why I think it is important to try writing freely in your own way, without falling into a mould.
What inspired the concept of time-travel within a café?
This story was initially written for a stage production. When I write a play, I start without a plot, deciding on a title, relationships, a rough story, and a final scene. After deciding on the title, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, I decided to write a story in which I could return to the past only for a short period of time, while the coffee was still hot. Then I came up with the annoying rules [that feature in the books] while writing the script.
I am not very good at writing plots and other details. When I write, I just write what comes to mind as it comes to me. So when I couldn’t get it right, I sometimes had to rewrite it from the beginning.
My influences in time-travel are the Japanese manga/anime Doraemon and the movie Back to the Future. Although my work cannot change reality, I still think the appeal of time travel lies in the ability to go back in time and change reality.
What messages or themes does the time-travel concept allow you to convey?
I have always written about the “power of life”. I believe that “zest for life” is the energy to live for a person. It is the energy that moves our heart. I hope to express this energy in plays and novels. Basically, I want to depict universal human emotions. Therefore, I hope to depict not only countries, but ideally, I hope to depict something that people 30 years ago and people 30 years from now will understand. I am conscious of writing in an easy-to-understand manner for this purpose.
How do you balance the fantastical elements of time-travel with the realism of your storytelling?
Although the story itself is a fantasy, I wanted to make it a story that would help people face reality by including the rule that “no matter how hard we try, we cannot change the future”. We cannot pretend that any sad event, tragic disaster or death of a loved one or significant other did not happen. I wanted to properly depict how we should face that reality. I believe the sentence “No amount of effort to go back in time can change reality” is a necessary rule to keep this story from becoming a pipe dream.
So, what do you think time-travel represents symbolically or metaphorically in the context of human experiences and emotions?
I think it’s “regret”. It is an approach to the past that cannot be recovered. Since I view “time-travel” as “regret”, I believe that all of the many regrets I have experienced in my life have triggered my interest.
Is there a time in your life you’d time-travel back to, a person you’d want a final conversation with?
I want to go back in time and meet my father who left this world at the young age of 38. I want to surprise my father by informing him of my current success. I want to tell him that my novels are read by people all over the world and even filmed in Hollywood. I also want to tell him how happy I am to be his son and how grateful I am.
Are there any upcoming projects or new books that you are working on that you can share?
In Japan, I will be doing a stage production of Before the Coffee Gets Cold in November. In Hollywood, a TV adaptation is in discussion. I am also working on an original story for an anime, although it is not Before the Coffee Gets Cold, and working on the sixth in my Coffee series. It will be published in Japan in the fall.
And a final question, how has Before the Coffee Gets Cold changed your life?
Before I became a novelist, I was very poor, and it was just a dream for me to travel outside of Japan, but now I am meeting readers all over the world. It is romantic to think that this book might still be read 100 or 200 years after I am gone. I have come to believe that the reason I was born into this world was to leave behind a work called Before the Coffee Gets Cold.
Toshikazu Kawaguchi appears in conversation with Maggie Tweedie, interpretation provided by Melanie Taylor, at the Auckland Writers Festival 14 - 19 May. For more information www.writersfestival.co.nz and to get tickets go here
