Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Finished December 4

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated by Geoffrey Trousselot

This book is the first in the series names for this title. It is a book set in a small basement coffee shop in a back alley in Tokyo. The shop has existed for decades and there is a legend that the shop also gives customers the chance to travel back in time. 

In this book, there are four stories, each with a customer visiting the cafe with the hope that the legend is true and that they can make such a journey. But there are rules around these journeys: One is that the traveller cannot change the present, no matter what they do. Another is that you can only meet someone who has visited the coffee shop. A third is that there is only one place in the shop that you can sit to travel, and you must remain in that seat for the duration. A fourth rule is the limit of the visit, the time is takes from the coffee being poured until it gets cold. And the visitor has to drink all the coffee or they will be stuck as a ghost. 

The visitors here go back for various reasons, and we see all of these visitors in the introduction to the first story. Here Fumiko wants to go back to have a different conversation with her boyfriend Goru who recently went to work in America. 

In the second story, Kohtake wants to go back to before her husband Fusagi, who has early-onset Alzheimer's, forgot who she was. A staff member at the shop says that the reason Fusagi wanted to go back was to give her a letter, but that she can go back to get it herself. 

The third story is the story of sisters. Hirai runs a snack bar near the coffee shop. She came to Tokyo from the outskirts of Sendai, a city a few hours north of Tokyo, where her parents ran an inn. Her younger sister Kumi comes often to the cafe to try to meet Hirai, but Hirai won't talk with her. Hirai left because her parents expected her to take over running the inn and she didn't want to, and they eventually transferred their expectations to Kumi. When something happens to Kumi, Hirai knows that she wants to have that conversation with her sister that she's been avoiding. 

The fourth story shifts the conversations around travelling in time to contemplate travelling to the future and the difficulty of determining whether the one you want to meet with be there at the time you travel to. One of the coffee shop workers decides to do it, with the others promising to do what they can to ensure the meeting takes place. 

I liked the premise of the book, and the parameters around these travels in time. They are very different from what we often see in novels with time travel as a concept. 

A feel-good read that will appeal to a variety of readers.