Author(s): Toshikazu Kawaguchi

General Fiction

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?

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

 This is such a quirky confection of a book! Originally written as a stage play, you can easily see the events unfolding before your eyes in a most theatrical and entertaining manner. A cosy Tokyo cafe offers customers the unique opportunity to travel back in time with some very, very specific caveats! They must remain in their seat so therefore the memory must have taken place within the cafe. Perhaps most importantly they must return before their coffee cools... the consequences for failing to obey this last rule are quite serious. Four individuals take advantage of the cafe's time travelling service with results both strange and sweet. Emilie