Review: Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Title: Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Year published: 2020

Category: Adult fiction

Pages: 272 pages

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): Japan

Summary: In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee—the chance to travel back in time.

Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn’t so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most importantly, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold.

Prepare to meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the cafe’s time-traveling 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.

Heartwarming, wistful, mysterious, and delightfully quirky, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s internationally bestselling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time?

Review: I received a book for Christmas but already had a copy, and when I went to exchange it, this novel caught my eye as one I had heard a bit about but not much. I snapped up a copy and began reading it the next day. I am so glad that I did! How did I miss this one when it first came out?!

I liked this gentle novel that followed the lives of people in a basement cafe. I like that a family ran it and knew their customers by name, that they were in each other's lives daily, and that they have this quirky seat in their cafe that allows people to travel back in time. The rules are fun, and I liked that the ghost of a past person who didn't follow the rules takes up the seat 24 hours a day with only one break each day to go to the toilet.

The novel is broken up into chapters that each cover a different person's experience at the cafe, and each of them has such poignant and touching reasons for time travel. They were emotional, real, and meaningful, and that helped me connect with each of the characters. It really got me thinking: if I could travel back in time, knowing that my actions would not affect the future, what would I choose to do?

Challenges for which this counts: