REVIEW: Before The Coffee Gets Cold (Toshikazu Kawaguchi)

Book: Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi

My rating: 4/5.

Premise: In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café that offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. Four visitors hope to make use of the cafe's time-travelling offer, in order to confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory is fading, to see their sister one last time, and to 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 they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold.

The book was a beautiful mix of light-hearted and bittersweet. We meet a handful of characters, 4 of which travel in time for various reasons. An over-riding theme is loss and closure. Time travelling can't change the present but it changes the outlook of the travellers. Confronting the past helps them heal and shapes the way they live their lives. Overall, this book is like a pleasant stroll - its calm and gentle but thought provoking and full of human emotion. Lovely.