The rules are both fun and agonising, especially due to the emotional anguish it causes the characters once you learn their reasons for journeying to the past and future.Įach story is rooted in difficult circumstances, packed with misfortune and sadness. In addition to this, the time travellers can only meet someone who has also visited the café themselves. One being that those who choose to travel in time cannot change history or impact the present regardless of whether they choose to act differently or not. There’s a few barriers to Kawaguchi’s time travel. Instead, it’s a clever and insightful look at human weakness, loss and the desire for meaningful relationships. It’s not so heavy on the science fiction side of time travel. Each chapter spotlights a different customer in the shop and their desire to time travel, but as those same customers make appearances throughout all chapters, the novel feels more connected and there’s beautiful sense of unity among the patrons as they support each other through their loves, losses and journeys through time. Before the Coffee Gets Cold combines the intense focus of a short story collection with the rich characterisation of a traditional novel.

Before The Coffee Gets Coldīut 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 have to return to the present before the coffee gets cold…Ī quirky, charming and heartbreaking story about a little coffee shop in Tokyo with a special seat that can send people through time. In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors to the shop, 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. This coffee shop also offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. The coffee-making process is described with considerable sensory detail. In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving meticulously brewed coffee for over one hundred years.

A cast of characters who pass in and out to the sonorous clank of the door ringer… clang-dong… reminiscent perhaps of a funicular motion, in and out, up and down. Translated by Geoffrey TrousselotĪ magical mystery novel by Toshikazu Kawaguchi set in a basement cafe named the Funiculi Funicula which of course is the title of a Neapolitan song to commemorate the opening of the first funicular railway on Mount Vesuvius. Before The Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, poignant novel set in TOKYOīefore The Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, poignant novel set in Tokyo.

Before the coffee gets cold review