Before the Coffee Gets Cold.

The entire TikTok book thing has passed me by. As a 60-year-old white male, I am officially banned from TikTok. So I've only ever experienced it at a distance. But I hear it's very important for selling books these days.

One of the books that’s sold a ton of copies because of all the TikToking is the English translation of a Japanese novel called Before the Coffee Gets Cold. I saw a copy of this in a bookstore—I want to say it was Harry Hartog in Bondi Junction—last time I was down in Sydney. And it may even have been in a part of the store given over to TikTok or BookTok recommendations.

Anyway, I liked the cover. It looked nice, and it was about time travel, and I was kind of curious about how the Japanese might handle it. Maybe a modern Japanese aircraft carrier goes back through time to help out Admiral Yamamoto or something. So I picked it up.

Of course, it then sat by my bed for the next couple of weeks, which turned into about six months before I finally opened it up the other night after racing through the most recent Steve Stirling novel.

The time-travel coffee shop premise is interesting (as far as I can tell - I haven't finished yet). It's all set in one room in a café in Tokyo. This would make sense, because the story started life as a stage play before becoming a book. And the premise of the thing is engagingly simple: there is a seat at a table in this bookstore where you can travel through time.

But there's a catch—you can't leave the table, and you have to get back to your present time before the coffee that you've ordered goes cold. Oh, and there is one other complication: the table is occupied pretty much 24/7 by a ghost—a young woman who didn't get back before her coffee went cold.

Okay, no time-traveling aircraft carriers, but I thought it might do me good to push out beyond my usual boundaries. So I started reading it. I'm still reading it, and I'm kind of enjoying it, even though it's very different from the sort of thing I normally read.

But it took me a while to get used to because I found the writing to be almost aggressively simplistic. Not even "simple," because simple prose can be beautiful. It read to me almost like it had been translated by an AI, which is increasingly a terrible thing to say about anybody's writing and becoming more and more common as an insult online: “Oh, you just got that out of ChatGPT.”

This is the book I read before going to sleep at night, and I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with the aggressively simplistic tone, to the point where I finally gave up and started doing some research, asking whether any other readers had complained about the weird feel to the translation.

And it turns out, yes, I was not alone. Even though this thing has gone berserk on BookTok, there’s a lot of people who got really pissed off with the translation. And it’s not a machine-translated book; there was an actual human being, apparently a very well-regarded and experienced translator.

One of the things which is most difficult to translate from Japanese to English, however, is social nuance, because they have such a complex and stratified social universe there. And a lot of that stratification materialises in language, but there's no way of translating that from Japanese into English, resulting in what seems like an aggressively simplistic form of prose at the other end.

However, having said all that, I've got to a point where I kind of enjoy it because it is my bedtime read. I’ll pick it up and read a scene or a chapter before going off to sleep. And weirdly, what I'm finding is that the simplicity of the language—which in no way implies that it's a simplistic story—the simplicity of the language is kind of… soothing.

I don't get overly excited the way that I would, say, reading Steve's book about time travellers going back to ancient Rome and teaching them about, like, gunpowder and antibiotics. That kind of stuff gets me fired up, and next thing I know, it's one o’clock in the morning and I'm still reading.

With Before the Coffee Gets Cold, the ideas can be really engaging, but because the language is so aggressively simple, it's very easy to pick up and then put down ten minutes later when my eyes are drooping.

If that sounds like something you'd be into, check it out.