Before the Coffee Gets Cold

 by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Serendipity --

I recently saw the quote by Viktor Frankl

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves".

This is a very powerful sentiment for me right now with what I am going through.  I saw positive comments about this book and decided to pick up a copy of a whim and I am so glad I did.

The story is set in Tokyo in a little basement cafe where it is rumoured people can go back in time.  The story starts with a young woman whose boyfriend broke up with her at the cafe, telling her he is going to the US to work.  She is devastated as she thought he was going to propose.  She is so startled she doesn't say anything and he leaves.

She goes back to the restaurant and says she wants to go back in time to tell her boyfriend she doesn't want him to go.  The hosts of the cafe tell her she can go back but nothing she does will change the present, she can only go back for the time it takes for a cup of coffee to cool off, if she doesn't return on time she will become a ghost (there is one lady ghost in the cafe).  She goes back to the time her boyfriend broke off with her.  She does tell him that she doesn't want him to go and as she returns to the present she hears him say he will be back in three years.

The next customer is the wife of a cafe customer who has rapidly developing Alzheimers.  Her husband has left a letter for her at the cafe but she hasn't wanted to read it.  She wants to go back in time to when her husband can still remember her.  They meet and she confirms to him that she knows about his diagnosis.  He seems relieved that she knows about it.  The letter he gave her tells her she doesn't have to feel obliged to stay with him.  However, this meetings cements her commitment to care for him whatever happens (she is a nurse).

The third story is about a young woman who runs a restaurant near the cafe. She is estranged from her family. Her sister had kept coming to Tokyo to try to convince her to come home and help run the family in.  The woman hides from her sister because she feels either her sister is jealous of her or that her sister doesn't want to run the inn and wants her to have the responsibility.  On the last time the sister comes to visit she is killed in a car accident.  The young woman is devastated, she feels reponsible for her sister's death as do her parents.  She goes back in time to the sister's last visit and the sister tells her that her dream was to have the two of them run the inn together.  The restuarant owner promises her sister she will go back and run the inn in her sister's memory.

The last story is about the wife of the owner of the cafe,  she dies in childbirth because of a heart condition,  Years after the woman died a young woman comes into the restaurant and goes back in time to meet her.  Later the woman asks to go into the future and she meets the young woman, realizing she is her daughter.  The woman had been worried that her daughter would be angry at her for not being around to raise her but the young woman thanks her for giving her her life.

While nothing changes about the sad things in these stories, all the characters seem to find a new perspective going forward.  

I think this book is amazing, at least for me right now!

The Secret Life of Sunflowers

 by Marta Molnar and Dana Morton

This book was getting a lot of positive comments recently.  It is about the wife of Theo Van Gogh (Van Gogh's sister-in-law fought to get Van Gogh's art into the public attention after Vincent and Theo's deaths.  It was an interesting story but not as engaging as some of the comments I read implied it would be.  The death of the Van Gogh's occur early in the book, there is very little detail about Van Gogh's art development or his life.

Bandit Queens

 by Parini Shroff

This book was on the best seller list, I didn't really know anything about it.  It certainly was not anything I expected.  The book takes place in India.  The main character is part of a group of women who get loans to create home crafts.  She is feared in the village because people believe she murdered her husband.  One of the women in her group, whose husband beats her and steals the money she makes to buy booze, comes to the woman and asks for help killing her husband.  The woman is shocked and doesn't want to have any part in this but the woman keeps nagging her so eventually she does help the woman accomplish the task by suggesting how to make a poison.

However, this turns out badly for her beause the woman whose husband was murdered comes to her and says now that her husband is dead she needs money to support her family and she insists the woman give her money or she will go to the police.  The widow says she will deny all knowledge of the murder.

Then another woman comes to her asking for help to murder a man.  She reluctantly agrees to assist with a distraction so the woman can get some poison in a garden.  But in the end the woman ends up murdering the man herself beause he tries to rape her.

One day, the main character's husband shows up claiming he is blind.  He steals her money but tries to endear himself to her.  Eventually she figures out he is faking blindness.  She tries to get him to leave with no success.

While this has all been occuring the woman had met a man who was a bootlegger who was mixing gasoline in with his alcohol, testing concoctions on stray dogs.  She steals one of his dogs and threatens to report him.

At the end of the book the bootlegger shows up at her house.  Her husband had agreed to let the bootlegger beat up his wife in payment for debts he owes the bootlegger.  In the rucus some of her female friends arrive at the house, her husband is shot in the leg by the bootlegger and the woman convinces him that if he leaves her alone she will not report him.

The woman someone gets her husband to leave and at the end delivers divorce papers to him at his parent's house where he is sponging off them.  It is very difficult for women to get a divorce even if spouses are abusive, the woman had to have a local council that would believer her.

This was a very strange book, but an interesting read.

The War Librarian

 by Addison Armstrong

This is another one of the books where the author combines a stories in the past and present and the stories connect at the end.  Why are so many authors doing this these days?  Why isn't one good story enough?

The story starts with a young woman whose grand mother has died.  She is working in a lost letter office trying to get letters that have not been delivered  back to their source.  I guess people may not have put return addresses on them.  She starts working on a letter and finds it is from a young man she grew up with and whom she likes very much.  He is writing from Europe to a New York debutante asking her to write him. It sounds like he hopes to marry her.  However the young woman know the debutante has recently married.  She is angry that the debutante did not have the guts/courtesy to write him back and tell him she is married  It is against the rules but the girl writes back to him as if she were the debutante.

Shortly after that she volunteers to go to France to work as a librarian in medical camps.  When she gets to France she is befriended by a young ambulance driver and wonder of wonders meets up with the soldier she wrote the letter to.  I can't remember if she tells him his girlfriend is married.

The other story is of a young man in the 70's who has been accepted into the U.S marine corps, the first class to accept women.  The women all go through terrible trials by the men and one man in particular takes a dislike to her and assaults her and sets her up for downfall.

The young woman and soldier become closer and eventually have sex.  While this is going on there is a campaign to not allow certain books about war, by germans, etc to be read.  If they show up in boxes of books donated the librarian she is supposed to destroy them.  The young woman reads a letter about a Librarian in the U.S. who is fired becasue he refuses to abide by these rules.  She and her soldier friend write a letter to the newspaper in the Librarian's city urging support for him.  In the meantime the girl has been hiding some forbidden books in her room.  She is discovered and sentenced for treason.  She is to be taken to a court in another city by the ambulance driver but the driver wants to get her to freedom. They change clothes for the drive.  Unfortunately their car is hit by a bomb and the ambulance driver is killed.  As the other young woman is dressed like the driver she takes her ID and eventually gets back to America.  She is pregnant.

In the end it turns out that the cadet's grandmother is the war librarian.

It was an okay story....