This book makes me want to write fanfiction (derogatory).
It is uncommon, honestly, for me to hate something that someone has made with earnest effort, even if I find it unpleasant, grotesque, or even insensitive. In fact, if it isn’t virulently hateful or supremacist, or utterly thoughtless, I find most of the art that humans make is wonderful in some way. But beyond a sprinkling of misogyny and a very standard universalist supremacism—both of which I shall get into—this book is uncommon in that it doesn’t fall in my usual wheelhouse of detestable media.
I do think this book perhaps shouldn’t exist, but it’s with the oddly gentle sense of wishing that that fly hadn’t got in my apartment, or that I hadn’t broken that glass, or that the city hadn’t removed that stop sign at that one intersection. It’s almost bewilderingly inoffensive, which makes my own ire feel bewilderingly aggressive.
The premise is that one may go back in time and have a conversation with someone they choose, but they can only talk for as long as it takes for a cup of coffee to get cold. There are more rules, which Kawaguchi explores quite exhaustively, but I don’t care about those. The premise is a bit twee, but I tend to eat that shit up. I love cute and cheesy and saccharine things. The chapters are titled accordingly, centered around the people having the conversations: the lovers, the husband and wife, the sisters, the mother and child.
I assumed, mistakenly, that the chapters would center around those conversations, but they didn’t. Most of the book seemed to be explaining the rules of the time-travel, a tad repetitively. It was like the book equivalent of being “on a second-screen,” as if the writer did not trust me to be paying total attention to the story he was writing. In a similar vein: the other chunk of each chapter was dedicated to explaining what the relationships of each of the chapters’ characters looked like in very expository, even simplistic, ways.
A skillful writer, I think, might be able to convey the matter of the characters’ relationships through the conversations themselves. After all, the 20 or so minutes that one has before one’s coffee gets cold is limited, but somehow is much longer than Kawaguchi seems to think. 20 minutes gives one a lot of space with which to talk, and gives the writer in turn a lot of room to explore voice, communication, pride and love in tandem. If I think of writing as art-craft, it seems like an exciting challenge, in a way—like writing an aubade, or a sonnet.
Alas, that was not Kawaguchi’s style, I suppose. He seemed to wish to convey a rushedness, a panic at not using one’s limited time well. This could be quite poignant; the restrictions, the rules, of life are transformed through this premise to clearly reveal the wasteful ways that we treat our present moments—our chance at meaningful moments and conversations dwindle to nothing as we see time as an endless resource, until it is jarringly brought to our attention. But, if that were the book’s aim, I wish it had been quite a bit shorter; it also doesn’t hold with the texture of the writing, which was otherwise quite chipper. The dissolution of a meaningful conversation into panic did not, in other words, feel intentional—it felt instead that Kawaguchi wrote without thinking much at all.
The conversations between the lovers, the spouses, the sisters, the mother & child, would extend about three to four very, very short pages, and I found myself begging at least one of the conversation partners to please sit down! Please talk with one another! I ought to be more careful about what I wish for, however, because the conversations were all quite bare of voice, of unique expression. This isn’t to say that Mrs. Fusagi isn’t conscientious, and Kei isn’t bubbly, and Kazu isn’t restrained; we know these women are these things, because the writer so kindly tells us in prose. Dialogue veers into arenas of stock-response, with very little friction or love lost between the characters.
I begged for wisdom, for connectedness, for the writer to show me something. Conversations can be wandering and wonderful and strange, but there was so bewilderingly little that was strange in BtCGC. I think Kawaguchi was aiming for universalism before anything, which diminished the possibility of anything delightful or even wise into nothing. Every sister should see herself in this book, which means that the characters are so very flat, the relationship so simply devoted, that there’s not a thread of color to either sister, despite one of them dressing garishly.
I’m not entirely sure the writer trusts women to be capable of showing something to anyone, despite a plethora of women characters in his text. There’s a kind of prescriptiveness to the relationships that I find a bit disturbing; wives act this way, mothers act this way, sisters act this way, a girl in love acts this way. They are all a bit stupid.
The three men of the novel are afforded a depth that the women are not—they get anecdotes, you see. Goro is passionate, intense, committed to his work, and promises to return to his lover (who keens after him, sobbing at the cafe in a skirt and shirt that reveals her nice figure [17]). We know this because we read about a time when he worked without sleep for days to fix a bug in a code that needed repairing. Nagare, the coffee shop manager, is somewhat quiet, is committed to his craft, and is deeply caring and is strong. We know this because once he was hit by a truck, careened through a window and got covered in wounds, but the first thing he did was get up and ask if the driver was ok. Mr. Fusagi has Alzheimer’s, and is polite, a bit closed off, and had a bit of a grouchy exterior outside a heart of gold when he was well. We know this because he loves gardens, and would caretake them. He would even take his wife travelling with him to see gardens, because he wanted to show her the things he loves.
Women, alas, don’t get anecdotes that aren’t directly related to their relationships; it was like watching a story fail the Bechdel test despite men being so outnumbered, and not even being the center of two of the conversations. Every time-travel is initiated by women, you see—because women, it seems, live for relationships, and men live.
—
One woman in this novel, remarkably, has a hobby. It’s Kazu, a server at the cafe. She makes pencil drawings in a hyperrealistic style, keeping her gaze unobtrusive, impartial, her voice shushed through objectivity.
…her own feelings didn’t form part of the filter through which she interacted with the world. Whatever happened, she tried not to influence it by keeping herself at a safe distance. That was Kazu’s place—it was her way of life. (242)
It is not lost on me that her art is perhaps the most inoffensive thing possible. It is also somehow without voice, without any friction that would avail interpretation. Preceding this passage is a discussion of Picasso’s artistic evolution from realism into abstraction, which gives the reader a sense that Kazu has the psyche of a very gifted child, failing to understand that artists inherently have a perspective and an influence on their surrounding world.
I think this is a universalist error, human in the ways that human is a supremacist category. Women are not full adult persons, even when they are talented and intelligent. We can learn from them as we learn from children, simple and errant but revealing in their errors. Conversations are human and so are universal and so are generic, because all that colors the perspective of the novel itself is universalist in its structure. The human, without insanity or queerness or feeling beyond affection, meddles with time, sips her coffee, and waits. The men fail to connect, to desire—they will never learn from her.
Leave a Reply