Before the Coffee Gets Cold
By: Toshikazu Kawaguchi / Narrated By: Arina Ii
Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
DEFinitely feeling torn on this one… translation? obvious writing? disappointing character development? was weeping into m’ hankie SEVeral times making my husband wonder what the deal was…?
Okay, so it’s like this.
I read the danged Publisher’s Summary for Before the Coffee Gets Cold, and I perused the (Glowing!) reviews elsewhere. So, methinks? Travel back in time to talk to anyone you’d like. Who’d it be (as the P. Summary dangles before)? Plus, it mentioned quirky characters or SOMEthing was quirky about it, dunno, but as I just finished and I now KNOW there was nary a quirk to be found.
ANYway! I started off disappointed cuz Arina Ii reads soooo slowly, PLUS the update for the Audible app made the audio skip. Sore, right off the bat, was I ever. And after sending off a frustrated email, blah blah reviewed negatively on the App Store blah, I had to speed up my Listening speed -but- that just made her voice tinny.
Then, apparently for this time travel thing to work, one must follow a set of rules which seem odd and like they can be out-thought, as in: WHY don’t they serve in a paper cup with a sleeve to keep it hot (But, yeh yeh yeh, I realize that was just me in a foul temper, so no, one really shouldn’t be thinking stuff like that as this is OBVIOUSLY a story where we’re totally meant to suspend disbelief).
Okay, so I got over THAT particular annoyance. Then I didn’t like the first character who wants to go back in time as she was brusque, rude, entitled, aggressive. So there’s that. Then when she does meet the guy she wanted to see again?
All right, all right, here’s where it kinda made me think of how we sometimes make our decisions based on fear, based on feelings of low self-worth. The guy’s reasoning was TRAGIC (Tiiiiiiny lump in throat), and his eventual last words were sweet (Lump goes away). And instead of being chock-full of stories, we’re treated to only four traveling jaunts.
On to the next: A married couple where he has Alzheimer’s and no longer remembers his wife, and she’s a nurse so she’s okay with distancing herself from the heartbreak and serving him as the useless warm body he’s turning out to be.
-BUT- He has a letter he’s written for her, and gosh (Biiiiiiigger lump this time), it’s really touching. Especially since by this time we’re all well aware that these meetings can’t change a danged thing, so when the wife comes back? He STILL won’t know her, no cure, disintegration continuing. But what the wife does for him when she’s in the past, what he himself knows, how it changes what the woman becomes for her own future self? Okay, a couple of tears.
Then we get to sisters parted by death, and then we come to the very last trip through time, and by the time Rick Lewis was hoping that I’d enjoyed this program, I was sobbing into a tissue I’d used before. Noooo, I kept shouting to myself: HOW on earth can you cry when the writing keeps TELLING us what-all is going on in each character’s thoughts, keeps TELLING us how to feel, how very sad/tragic/uplifting this all is? I haaaate obvious writing like that, and I wondered about the writer coming off like an amateur (He’s not), or that the translator was getting pretty jack-all lazy about his word choices whenst constructing sentences (Maybe).
So here I am, still NOT knowing what I feel about this. That it could’ve been better? Sure. Maybe they could’ve gotten a better translator (tho’ no translator is named, sooo is this an author writing outside his native tongue, and wouldn’t it be nice to know?) or narrator? Okay. That we didn’t need ponderous speaking, redundant sentiments? Definitely.
But that doesn’t change the fact that, dude! Seriously! That last jaunt had me bawling, and I guess I greatly resent the fact that something written so poorly could, quite obviously judging from the state of the single tissue I allowed myself, tweak m’ heartstrings so capably.
Torn I tell you, torn. How on EARTH am I s’posed to rate something like this? 3-stars for annoying writing and underdeveloped characters who, when given the ultimate chance, waste sooo much time by holding back what they wanna say? 3-stars for a narration that reminded me just how different our American culture with its over the top mentality is sooo very much NOT the staid reserve of Japanese culture?
Or 5-stars cuz my husband finally came over and handed me that second tissue I REFUSED to grab for m’self cuz I was a bundle of disappointment sitting in a pool of tears, both happy and sad? Dunno, I tell you.
…just dunno…
:)
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