Before the coffee gets cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

 

Paperback, 213 pages

Published September 19th 2019 by Picador (first published December 6th 2015)

Original Titleコーヒーが冷めないうちに

Edition Language: English

Geoffrey Trousselot (Translator)

Fiction

Library

Series: Before the Coffee Gets Cold #1

At first I was interested, but it missed something. Maybe it was just too straightforward, because in the end I come out of it with only a sense of it being ok.

There is a café, if you sit in a certain seat you can travel in time. But only to that seat. So yes, why bother. You can only sit in that seat and only for a moment. And people accept this as truth, and some travel.

And that is what this book is about. People travelling in time. A woman who wants to see her ex again. A man and woman who wants to meet again. Someone looking for a missed opportunity. And then we get some of their pasts too, but it is a short book. A short glimpse into the past and future.

I mean I did like it, but at the same time, yeah, only ok.

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

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?