before the coffee gets cold

Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Trussellot, Toshikazu Kawaguchi's beautiful and moving book *Before the Coffee Gets Cold* explores the age-old question: What would you do if you had the chance to travel back in time? And, more importantly, who would you most want to meet, perhaps one last time? In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully prepared coffee for over a hundred years. But this café offers its customers a unique experience: the opportunity to travel back in time. In *Before the Coffee Gets Cold*, we meet four visitors, each hoping to take advantage of the café's time-travel offer: to confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been robbed by early-onset Alzheimer's disease, see their sister one last time, and meet the daughter they never had the chance to know. But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a designated seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold...