What would you change if you could go back in time?
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café 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 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.
But 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 must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .
Written by Toshikazu Kawaguchi and translated by Geoffrey Trousselot, the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series is comprised of several books: Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the Café, and Before Your Memory Fades. Each book consists of four intertwined short stories, all about visitors at a special cafe. Legend has it that if you sit in a specific seat at this cafe, you’ll be able to time travel. There are, however, four rules: You must sit in a particular seat, you must stay in your seat for the entire time, and you must finish your coffee before it gets cold. Meaning, you can only meet with someone who has been to that same cafe before. If you don’t finish your coffee before it gets cold, you’ll turn into a ghost, and stay in the cafe forever. In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Kawaguchi explores the question of not just “what would you change if you could go back in time”, but also “who would you meet if you could go back in time”?
As is the case with most short story collections, there were some stories that I related to more than others, but in the end, each story left me feeling melancholy, heartbroken and simply, bittersweet. Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a beautiful series about grief, and past regrets — two themes that I’m always drawn to. Personally, I love “What If” stories, such as the film Sliding Doors, If/Then the musical, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Maybe in Another Life, so it’s no surprise that I love Before the Coffee Gets Cold.
I picked up Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the Café approximately a year before picking up Before Your Memory Fades, and so I was extremely grateful for the relationship map in the front of the book. I do think that I missed out on several references and call backs to the prior novels, although I was able to spot a few here and there. I love how within each book, we also get to find out a little bit more about the cafe staff, and their relationships and their regrets.
Out of the three books, my favorite was probably Before Your Memory Fades, in part because the stories felt the most interconnected. In Before Your Memory Fades, there’s a recurring theme of “If the world was ending tomorrow, which option would you choose?”, which really added to the story and characterizations. I do think that the stories and the twists start to get repetitive, especially in Before Your Memory Fades, but I also didn’t care too much. This series always makes me reflect on my life and the relationships I have. It’s an incredibly cozy read, and I definitely recommend it to all readers!
Links for Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Goodreads | TheStorygraph | Bookshop.org
