Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Ironically, timelessness—the sense of a continuous present where time does not appear to pass—is a key motif in this time-traveling novel. From the outset, the café exists as a liminal space. The windowless basement obscures the time of day, season, and weather, and so allows visitors to tune in more deeply to their inner landscape. This is similar to the experience of visiting a café in general; many café-goers enjoy being able to immerse themselves in the flow of savoring a warm beverage, reading, or having a conversation. Similarly, the café’s ability to stay cool without air conditioning makes it a refuge for its visitors’ thoughts and activities. The notion of waiters who are always present to serve customers and the ghost woman who eternally reads her novel supports a sense of time continuous.

The arms of the three antique wall clocks, which all show different times, disorientate customers, who “on their first visit never [understand] why they [are] like this” and check their own watches for reassurance that they have not lost track of time (2). However, the divergent showings imply that losing control of time is inevitable. This happens to Fumiko; while she is waiting for the unpredictable moment when the ghost woman leaves her seat, she falls asleep and doesn’t know how many hours have elapsed when she wakes. This temporal disorientation is a prelude to the more dramatic feat of time travel and sets the atmosphere for such magic to take place.

The ghost woman, or “the woman in the dress” as she is known in the text (78), is a grim warning of what awaits any time traveler who lets the coffee grow cold without drinking it, just as the novel’s title warns. She symbolizes the perils of unchecked human passion and raises the stakes of each traveler’s visit. The woman’s permanently unseasonal attire—a “white short-sleeved dress”—indicates how she got carried away in the heat of a past moment and now belongs to it (6). She will only be liberated when another time traveler either gets carried away and forgets to drink the coffee or actively chooses not to drink it, as Hirai almost does in Part 3. This juxtaposes the ghost woman—or rather, her symbolic role as the guardian of the chair—against Kei, who urges Hirai to remember her promise and guides her back to her own time.

Aside from symbolizing the dangers of unchecked nostalgia, the ghost woman is an invaluable aspect of The Constraints of Time Travel. She ensures that visits to the past or future are sparse and meaningful; without her, anyone could sit in the time-traveling chair at any time. The woman trains the would-be chrononauts in patience, a quality that many must learn before they can reach their desired outcome. Those like Hirai and Fumiko, who try to shove her out of her seat, are struck by her curse: a disturbing state of heaviness and coldness as a wailing fills the room. This emulates her ghostliness and serves as a warning against impatience.

However, as frightening as the curse is, the ghost woman can be placated by a freshly brewed cup of coffee. The woman is also permanently reading a book called The Lovers, an activity many café-goers partake in. This, combined with her daily trips to the bathroom, make her seem like a typical café customer rather than an ethereal being. In this way, she contributes to the café’s combination of mundanity and magic.

Memory plays an essential role in any novel about time travel, as it enables people to visualize when their own lives were different and encourages them to imagine how things might have been. Before she performs the ritual that will send Kohtake back in time, Kazu asks Kohtake “to form a strong image of the day [she wants] to return to” (86), indicating that the ability to visualize a concrete past is crucial to successful time travel.

Fumiko does this automatically, having already replayed her conversation with Goro a million times in her head. Still, while memory has helped her construct a rehearsal of the conversation, time travel actually complicates the revisited interaction due to the rigid rules of the café. In Fumiko’s head, she has full control over the memory, but when she actually time travels, many elements are beyond her. For example, in her memory, Fumiko sits at the same table as Goro; when she travels back, she has trouble accounting for why she is at a different table and drinking coffee, which Goro knows she hates.

Memory plays an important role in all of the time travelers’ experiences, acting as a watershed between drinking the coffee and traveling to their desired point in time. It allows them to share with the reader parts of their story that they may have been repressing. Fumiko, for example, recalls that Goro never explicitly said that he loved her. Kohtake remembers her husband’s short letters during their courtship, which frustrated her until she learned he could not read or write. These memories add complexity to the characters’ wishes to time travel. Fumiko’s memories show how she has long doubted Goro’s feelings for her, which implies that she is traveling to the past to reassure herself that her fears are invalid. Hirai is initially reluctant to time travel for similar reasons; she does not want confirmation that her sister hates her, as she has long believed.

The motif of memory comes to the fore with Fusagi, the patient with Alzheimer’s who cannot remember his own wife. Fusagi has even lost his sense of his self; once finicky and abrasive, he is now placid, fading into the background. However, his lack of memory also has a positive side. Previously, Fusagi was self-conscious about his illiteracy and could not fully convey his love for Kohtake. Now, liberated from such an identity, he is eager to give his wife a crucial letter that openly states his feelings. Moreover, he reads copious travel magazines and makes notes as an unconscious means of remembering his wife and the journeys they have taken together. Kohtake too must let go of her memories of the former Fusagi. Time travel helps her embrace being his wife in a new way, and she begins to read the magazines alongside him, entering the game of communication.

Lastly, memories allow the reader themselves to time travel, shedding light on unseen aspects of characters and relationships. This is shown with Nagare and Kei’s courtship. This particular flashback shows Kei’s deep confidence and strength of character and proves that she has always been a woman of strong convictions. Such scenes serve to add depth to the characters, which makes their stories more impactful overall.