Finché il caffè è caldo

Italian language

Published Nov. 29, 2020

ISBN:
978-88-11-60876-9
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(7 reviews)

Before the Coffee Gets Cold (コーヒーが冷めないうちに, Kohi ga Samenai Uchi ni) is a 2015 novel by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. It tells of a café in Tokyo that allows its customers to travel back in time, as long as they return before their coffee gets cold.

4 editions

None

This book reads like stage directions, and perhaps it would be even better suited as a play.

The book tells 4 stories about 4 different women and their experiences sitting in a special chair in a special cafe drinking a special cup of coffee (after they the moody ghost woman goes for her daily pee) and going back in time.

Each person goes back to speak to someone they know and love, and in all cases, as is repeatedly emphasized, they are not able to change anything that happened between that time and the time they sat down to go back. But they all come back changed. In story after story, we see how although looking back and interrogating the past can't change what's already happened, it can change where go in the future.

My biggest critique of the book is that it suffers from "women written by men" syndrome. …

Charming and sweet, if a little on the nose at times.

The premise, there's a seat in a coffee shop that allows you to travel to any other moment in time. The constraints - you can't leave the seat, and you only have as long as a cup of coffee stays warm.

The rules of the café are a bit silly, and repeated a few too many times, but the characters and the themes of the book are warm as a good cup of coffee, charming as a small out of the way café, and mostly very sweet in a way that coffee isn't. A time travel story that makes the simple point that what we really want when we fantasize about doing it is not a change to change the world, but to speak with someone.

Worth the short read.

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