Time, Love, and Perspective in 'Tales from the Café'

Also published in The Literary Times 

This essay is my response to Tales from the Cafe: A Novel—the second book in the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series. The series hinges on a cafe that allows one to travel back—and forward—in time. This is possible only while sitting in the chair, one which is constantly occupied by a ghost, and that one has to grab during her once-daily trip to the toilet if they want to make use of this special offering by the cafe. Time travel begins from the moment coffee is poured to the customer and lasts till the coffee gets cold. The person travelling has to drink up the coffee to return to the present before it goes cold or else…

I picked this book because the first one in the series had ended almost on a spiritual note for me: “At the end of the day, whether one returns to the past or travels to the future, the present does not change. So it raises the question: just what is the point of that chair?’ But … no matter what difficulties people face, they will always have the strength to overcome them. It just takes heart. And if the chair can change someone’s heart, it clearly has its purpose.” This was some time ago, and since I’ve never read a book twice, I thought of picking up the second one in the series for the purpose of this essay.

This book lived up to my expectation of stirring the heart. It focuses on how people are so different in their observation of life, yet so similar in that everyone, at the end of the day, wants love. It rendered me sympathetic to the characters in the stories—there are four distinct accounts beautifully interwoven to form a coherent narrative of the book. Among the merits of the book is Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s presentation of perspectives—how different people respond to the same event, owing to the individual histories that make them who they are.

The book made me appreciate certain writers’ ability to evoke profound emotions in readers through a moving and insightful representation of life, allowing them the Aristotelian catharsis.

I often chased after writers whose expression and narration were so complex that only ‘intellectuals’ could follow the intended idea, while the meaning would be completely lost on ‘laymen’. It let me ride my high horse, looking down on those who didn’t ‘get’ that kind of literature. However, this series made me appreciate that art has two components: form and content, and while I was so focused on the ‘form’, I hadn’t, perhaps, fully understood the importance of the ‘content’. This book—perhaps because it was originally written in another language and only later translated into English—uses such ordinary language, yet offers profound insights into varying human perspectives and an evocative rendering of human emotions that leave one captivated by the writer’s keen observation and creative genius.

Talking of specifics, one narrative device I found very smartly conceived was how the author fashioned a ghost to occupy the chair at all times, emptying it only during her once-daily trip to the toilet, leaving the window up for quick grabs by the person waiting to travel in time, as a way to keep the traffic for the seat in check—lest there be queues for this unique experience, requiring the narrative to be fast-moving, rendering little time for the readers to get to know the characters and their back stories that is necessary to empathise with them.

Another thing that renders weight to the narrative is how the author makes this experience of time travel meaningful: One has limited time while in the past or in the future, and those wanting to take this journey can travel in time only once in life.

One thing I found tough to reconcile, however—beyond the obvious theme of time travel—was the novel’s truly fantastical element: its depiction of an ideal world where everyone looked out for one another and no one ever wronged anybody. The only villain featured is life. There are four main stories in the book, and in two of them there are passing remarks about people who cared little about others’ loss over their own profit, but all the main characters throughout the book are almost divine for they don’t have a streak of evil in them, and they constantly stand guard over others. But then, who’s to say that isn’t another merit of the book—the author’s deliberate choice to offer a guiding light? Perhaps the author meant to suggest that life is unfair enough in its own right; we don’t need to turn against each other on top of that, and the least we can do is choose kindness.

This inherent goodness in people particularly struck me in the story titled “The Lovers.” When the protagonist discovers he has a life-threatening condition and only six months left to live, he starts making arrangements for his girlfriend’s future, ensuring to leave her in a good place. Ordinarily, many people in such circumstances might strain their relationships, owing to the bitterness of having been dealt the wrong cards. But not this man. The moment he realises his fate, he ventures into a maze of details to plan an assiduous trip to the future to make certain that the love of life is moving on fine. But then again, they say nothing without an existential basis can be conceived in the human mind—so perhaps this innate goodness really does reside in us; we just need to become aware of it. After all, in many Eastern traditions, especially the Indian ones, we’re told that a human being’s true Self is Divine Nature, that humans are destined for Divinity—we simply need to let the inner light reveal itself.