272 pages
English language
Published Jan. 7, 2021
In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee—the chance to travel back in time.
Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn’t so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold.
Heartwarming, wistful, mysterious and delightfully quirky, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s internationally bestselling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time?
I found the first story a bit slow, it took a bit of time to explain the rules so I wasn’t too sure I’d like it. Everything changed (to me) from the second story onwards.
Molto commovente ma speravo meglio.
An easy to read and heartwarming story. It spoke to my sad soul and made me cry, so it must have been good.
This started slow for me, but I did eventually get into it. It could easily be staged as a play, and I think the time travel piece is somewhat interesting (though, the author does try to get around the inevitable plot holes of a time travel story with a series of unexplained "rules").
