In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe 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 cafe’s time-travelling offer, in order to confront the lover who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has begun to fade, 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 cafe, 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?

Blurb from the inside cover of Before the Coffee Gets Cold

It has been a good few weeks since I posted my last review, and so I have several books that I read a while ago, that I haven’t yet reviewed. This book being one of them.

I bought the book for my husband rather than myself. He reads more than I do, and reads lots of science-fiction as well as lots of Japanese fiction (as well as a myriad of other books), so this book with its combination of time-travel and a Japanese author seemed perfect for him. He really enjoyed the book, so much so that he has since bought, but not read yet, the follow up book.

I haven’t read much science-fiction, but as my husband likes this genre very much our TV viewing habits have included a very generous helping of science-fiction, and it is now infiltrating my reading habits as well now, apparently (I have a science-fiction trilogy that I read over the summer and couldn’t put down to write up in the next week or so, watch this space). I am not sure how I feel about that, to be honest, but I do know how I feel about this book.

The time-travelling part of the book, while it is a key feature of the book, is more of a device to explore the lives and stories of the characters I think. To revisit a day they wish they could re-do, to find out more about people they love, to maybe ease their conscience. The book is about those 4 characters, and not so much about the fact of their time-travelling.

The 4 stories told in the book, while they are interconnected in that they all frequent the same cafe and drink the same coffee, are stand-alone stories. I liked reading one of the stories, and then putting the book down to think about that story for a little while. The characters are all flawed in their own way. They are not perfect, they are not brilliant, or wealthy, or beautiful or brave necessarily. These are people that5 very much live alongside us all, and characters that you would probably recognise from your own coffee shop – with the exception of one character who usually occupies “that” seat – you will see what I mean if you read the book.

My favourite books are not epic stories, but more the sorts of books where you get to see a “slice of life”, a snippet of a character’s life. You don’t get to hear their whole life story, or see how the events of the book change their life. But you do get to see a part of their life, and you get to imagine their ending, or their development for yourself. This is one of those books for each of the 4 characters. It is one of those books that I will think about every now and then, and will stay with me for a while. I really liked it, and would absolutely recommend it. Unless you like action books or epic fantasy novels. In which case, I’d probably advise you to give this one a miss.

This book is a lovely, easy, character-driven read. It is not a particularly long read at 213 pages. I am looking forward to reading the next book, Tales from the Cafe. I would give Before the Coffee Gets Cold 4.5 out of 5 stars. Read it, it’s lovely.