Before the Coffee Gets Cold

by Toshikazu Kawaguchi • 2015

If you could go back, who would you want to meet? In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which 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 cafe in the hopes of making that journey. But tiem travel isn't so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can take only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold. Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story – translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot – explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time?