Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi is a short, sweet novel told in four interconnected stories. Each is set in a small, timeless, basement café in Tokyo. Inside that café, there is a particular chair, guarded by a ghost in the guise of a book-reading woman. The chair has a special magic. When seated in it, you have the opportunity to travel back to the past, but only for the length of time it takes for your cup of coffee to cool. If you don’t drink the entire cup before it cools, you’ll be stuck, just as the ghost is stuck.
There are other rules as well. You cannot leave the chair while you’re in the past. And you can only meet people who have also been to the café. You also have to go with the full knowledge that nothing you do or say when you return to the past will change the present. Given the difficulty of complying with the rules and the seeming futility of it all, very few customers give it a try. What would be the point? But this is a novel of four people who do.
The people in the novel are lovely, dealing with real-life woes. The language is beautiful despite a little stiltedness. (I read it in English translation from the Japanese.)
The question posed by the book: What would you change if you could travel back in time? —knowing that it’s impossible to change the present—is answered by the end. It seems revisiting the past does have a point.
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