Before the Coffee Gets Cold - Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Description

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 – translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot – 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?

For fans of The Guest Cat and If Cats Disappeared from the World, Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a touching story about second chances and how we find and lose the ones we love.

Review

I love time travel books and books set in Japan, so for me this is a match made in heaven. I must say first though, that if you are a time travel fan, this is translated from Japanese. Meaning it is written in a very different way to most books of this genre and is not a western way of looking at the subject. 

For me this approach made the book all the better and I just loved it's whimsical approach to time travel. The whole book is set in a cafe with a the same characters at different times of their lives and how if they sit in a particular seat they can travel back in time. There are rules to the time travel such as they can only stay in the seat in the cafe once they have travelled back in time and they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold. Unlike most time travel theories in this explanation you cannot alter the future.

A thought provoking read covering delicate subjects such as dementia and bereavement. I loved the gentleness and calmness of the book. A perfect read for any time of year but a good one to unwind with.

I'm giving this book five out of five stars and my thanks to Netgalley for the ARC to review.