In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café that 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.
Before the coffee gets cold is the story of a café in Tokyo that has one special chair that allows people to time travel. The process is a bit of a mystery, but one that has existed for over one hundred years. Customers come into this magical café with hopes to travel to the past as well as the future.
This time traveling process comes with several rules. First, one can only time travel while inside the cafe. The time travel process does not alter the present circumstances and the duration of the time travel must last for as long as the coffee remains warm.
As soon as a customer sits in the special chair, they are poured a mug of freshly brewed coffee. The customer has the choice to travel either to the past or the future, but they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold or they will turn into a ghost.
This book was very different from what I expected going in. I loved how Kawaguchi interwove several stories into one beautiful tale of love, regret, and hope. There are some nostalgic and some very sad parts in this book, but I loved the symbolism in the story. The idea that if you are “stuck” too long in the past or the future will turn you into a ghost is a great message to the importance of visiting the past and thinking about the future for a short time, but how our lives must be lived in the present.
Ultimately, Kawaguchi asks the reader “At the end of the day, whether one returns to the past or travels to the future, the present does not change. So it raises the question: ‘just what is the purpose of that chair?'”
I invite you to grab a cup of your favorite warm beverage and find out the answer for yourself.
Format: Paperback, 213 pages. Original Title: コーヒーが冷めないうちにPublished: September 19th, 2019 by Picador (first published December 6th 2015)
ISBN: 1529029589
Source: Purchased
Rating: 4 stars
Genre: Fiction, magical realism
For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life–until the unthinkable happens.
When a music festival rolls through the sleepy town of Hesterville, Georgia, the Dixon family’s lives are forever changed. On the final night, a storm muffles the sound of the blaring music, and Rachel tucks her baby into bed before falling into a deep sleep. So deep, she doesn’t hear the kitchen door opening. When she and her husband wake up in the morning, the crib is empty. Emily is gone. Vicki Robart is one of the thousands at the festival, but she’s not feeling the music. She’s feeling the emptiness over the loss of her own baby several months before. When she leaves the festival and is faced with an opportunity to fill that void, she is driven to an act of desperation that will forever bind the lives of three women. When the truth of what actually happened that fateful night is finally exposed, shattering the lives they’ve built, will they be able to pick up the pieces to put their families back together again?
This is the story of Addy who lives in London and has breast cancer. During a break from her chemotherapy treatment, she comes across a lost letter in which her late father reveals that he had fallen in love with a Moroccan woman. Together with the letter she also finds pictures of her father and the Moroccan woman in which it appears the woman might have been pregnant.
Growing up, Josie and Meredith Garland shared a loving, if sometimes contentious relationship. Josie was impulsive, spirited, and outgoing; Meredith hardworking, thoughtful, and reserved. When tragedy strikes their family, their different responses to the event splinter their delicate bond. Fifteen years later, Josie and Meredith are in their late thirties, following very different paths. Josie, a first-grade teacher, is single—and this close to swearing off dating for good. What she wants more than the right guy, however, is to become a mother—a feeling that is heightened when her ex-boyfriend’s daughter ends up in her class. Determined to have the future she’s always wanted, Josie decides to take matters into her own hands. On the outside, Meredith is the model daughter with the perfect life. A successful attorney, she’s married to a wonderful man, and together they’re raising a beautiful four-year-old daughter. Yet lately, Meredith feels dissatisfied and restless, secretly wondering if she chose the life that was expected of her rather than the one she truly desired. As the anniversary of their tragedy looms and painful secrets from the past begin to surface, Josie and Meredith must not only confront the issues that divide them but also come to terms with their own choices
A Wondrous Bookshelf 