We all have regrets, things we are embarrassed about and would like to undo if given a chance. But sadly, life doesn’t work like that. As much as we wish it were, time travel isn’t possible in real life. But we can indulge in a little vicarious living every now and then, thanks to good fiction where surreal things like time travel happen all the time. And books like these, though they won’t be able to change our past, can help us make our futures a little better.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s ‘Before the Coffee Gets Cold’ takes place in a café in Tokyo where, along with great coffee, customers are given a chance to travel back in time. There’s a woman who goes back in her past to confront the lover who left her, a wife who wants to get a letter her husband wrote to her before his memory started to fade, a pub owner who is estranged from her family but wants to see her sister one last time, and a mother who travels 10 years into her future to get a glimpse of the daughter she never got to meet.

But there are some conditions of time travel: They must sit in a particular seat and not get up—they will be forcibly brought back to the present if they do so. And they must also return to the present before the coffee gets cold, else they will forever be stuck in the past.

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Originally written as a stage play before being adapted into a novel, there is a certain theatricality to it. Even the setting and characters are reminiscent of theater performances. The book consists of four individual stories and though you don’t have to read them in order, it helps if you do. The characters, at least the recurring ones, make better sense that way.

There are times when the narrative is a bit sappy but the lessons the stories impart and the bouts of introspection they lead to more than make up. Another issue I had with the writing style, or perhaps it’s the translation that is faulty, is that the same thing is said multiple times. But these are minor niggles. Before the Coffee Gets Cold might be a little rough but it feels like a comforting warm chocolate drink on breezy autumn evenings.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Three stars
Fiction
Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Translated from the Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot
Published: 2019
Publisher: Picador
Pages: 213, Paperback