Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

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 Alzheimer’s, see their sister one last time, and 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…

I really liked the premise of Before the Coffee Gets Cold. Time travel is by no means a new idea but the fact that arbitrary rules are attached to it, including a time limit on how long they can spend in the past, help to avoid it seeming too good to be true.

Each of the four customers have a different reason for wanting to return to the past and the café staff represent the continuity between each of their tales. This made the book read almost like four short stories set in the same place, with the same background characters.

This is a simply written book. To be honest, I felt that this simplicity spilled over into the characters – each did have some defining traits but they lack much complexity. That said, I was not distracted from the plot by any of this so this is a small criticism.

There are some really heartfelt moments in Before the Coffee Gets Cold. We can all relate to the characters’ wish to have a final conversation with someone, or to say things they wished they had said in the moment. In the real world, we have to be satisfied with imagining those conversations, whereas we see what happens when the characters in this book experience them as reality.

The main message in Before the Coffee Gets Cold is that we must not hold back on saying what is on our minds to our loved ones at the time. These characters have the chance to go back and change that but the unsaid warning throughout the book is that we, the readers, do not get that chance, and we must live life to the full as best as we can in the moment.