The present doesn’t change, but our outlook and attitude may be altered. ( )

A disappointing and wobbly spin on an interesting concept. In Toshikazu Kawaguchi's short, cute novel, there is a cosy little café where customers can travel back in time for a brief period so long as they follow a series of arbitrary rules. How the time-travel works is never explained (you just drink a coffee while sat in a particular seat, apparently) and the reason behind all the rules isn't explained either. But they include that the time-traveller cannot get up from their seat, cannot change the future when in the past and, as the title has it, must return before the coffee gets cold.

This naturally puts limiters on the story Kawaguchi can tell: there's no great adventure or mystery or alteration of spacetime here. But that's not the point: the point is that by the coffee-drinkers returning to a certain time, meeting a certain person in their past, they can reach an understanding of their present situation even if they cannot get up from their seat (for example, the first story/chapter has a woman going back to revisit a former lover, the 'one who got away', and telling him what she never had the courage to tell him at the time). Each of the four interconnected stories/chapters in Before the Coffee Gets Cold has this intention: for the coffee-drinkers to find inner peace by a sort of interactive meditation with a moment in their past.

However, the flaws in the book shred through its promise. This story motive of characters finding peace should be subtle and quiet, but in Kawaguchi's hands it is clumsy and bashes you over the head with its morals. The author explains each point so that even the densest reader will get it, and his determination to lead the reader by the hand puts a choke-hold on any storytelling momentum or artistic flair. The writing itself is unimpressive: simple at best, and with one or two moments of sentimental pathos, it is all too often sparse in language and shallow in its characterisation. (There's also a ghost which is never explained – it's a scatter-brained book at times.) Before the Coffee Gets Cold is cosy and has a quaint little idea, but the coffee is weak and the novel is chick-lit-adjacent fare rather than a piece of genuinely credible writing. ( )

This was quite sweet and I adore the premise but it felt almost as though it lacked personality. ( )

I expected to love this, but found it only okay. I would read the next one, but I'm not obsessed. Perhaps the original version was more enticing, and the translation left out some? ( )

Not a huge fan of the writing style - at times it felt very repetitive and like the author was holding my hand as he explained things to me that were pretty clear or could be inferred - but I loved the sci-fi element to if and the way that the time travel works. The rules are very clear and well established and I really enjoyed the characters. Even though the people who run the cafe aren't sure how it works, they know all the rules and are strict about them and I really liked that mysteriousness to the mechanics of time travel without the author having to try too hard to explain it. ( )