Tag Archives: before the coffee gets cold

Before the Coffee Gets Cold – Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Before the Coffee Gets Cold – Toshikazu Kawaguchi

This is my book club book for November. I know the third one has just been released and lots of people are talking about this story.

Here’s the blurb …

What would you change if you could go back in time?

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? 

This was an easy read. I would describe it as inter-connected short stories. We follow the people who choose to go back in time. What I did notice is that everyone who went back in time began to see the situation from the other person’s perspective (which can’t be a bad thing). I am not sure if I will read anymore, although it would be nice to learn about the ghost lady.

A review

Leave a Comment

Filed under 3, Fiction