Category: 3.5 star

If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?

It’s 1969 in New York City’s Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. The Gold children—four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness—sneak out to hear their fortunes.

The prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in ’80s San Francisco; dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.

A sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.

This is one of those books I saw at a bookstore, and seemed really interesting, so I instantly went to go to the library to go borrow and read it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite what I expected, but I think in the end it was still an interesting read.

The Immortalists has an interesting premise. There is a lady who can tell you the exact date of your death. What happens to your life after you know this date? And is the lady even telling the truth or just a fraud? This is the conundrum that the Gold children face after meeting the woman one fateful day as kids. Each child grows up with the weight of their upcoming death on their shoulders, and develop in different ways armed with this knowledge. Just how is one’s life affected by this knowledge?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café that 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.

From the author of Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Tales from the Cafe comes another story of four new customers, each of whom is hoping to take advantage of Café Funiculi Funicula’s time-travelling offer. Among some familiar faces from Kawaguchi’s previous novels, readers will also be introduced to a daughter, a comedian, a sister, and a lover, each with something they wish they had said differently.

With his signature heartwarming characters and immersive storytelling, Kawaguchi once again invites the reader to ask themselves: what would you change if you could travel back in time?

The third instalment of the Before the Coffee Gets Cold “series.” This one had different vibes in my opinion compared to the previous ones, and isn’t strictly worse than the previous. However, I personally didn’t enjoy them as much as I did the first two, which reflects in the lower rating. Of course I will explain why below!

Before Your Memory Fades is a similar story to the other two books in the series, revolving around stories of those who come in for a chance to talk to someone in the past, even when nothing about the present can change. Why do people make such a journey? Well, the most obvious answer by now is that the present facts may not change, but the mindset of the person going and coming back from the past can ultimately be altered by the journey. I suppose it’s an illustration of how the journey can be just as important as the destination.

The characters were of course, excellently developed and explored, as per usual. This is one of the strongest points of the story, and even when characters aren’t the most relatable, their plight can often be understood, and the emotions are brought out well by the author. The characters were certainly a little bit more specific and less general here in their problems, so I found them slightly harder to relate to. But that being said I still felt the emotions of what these individuals had to deal with, and this is always expressed well.

The overall plot was decent as well, and the way the characters were tied together were organic enough. The main problem that I had with this book was that the focus was a lot less on the actual stories itself and the growth through that journey, but rather overall it felt a lot more like a commentary on the whole coffee process in general, and why one might want to go back into the past. There was still an emotional element, but I felt that a lot of the focus and perspective was shifted onto a more overarching view about what the journey represents, and how people can benefit from it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I felt that I had a deeper connection to the characters and a more emotional journey when I got to live through the experiences of the individual stories more.

Overall Recommendations

Before Your Memory Fades is another part in the saga of Before the Coffee Gets Cold. We continue to meet more characters who wish to time travel despite not being able to change the facts of the present. A story much more about the whole process of going back and why anyone would do so, it is still a very intriguing story, and the author certainly knows how to tug at your heartstrings. If you have read the first two books in the series, I’d recommend reading this one too. Let me know what you think as well, as a comparison to the first two!