![]() Changing the present simply isn’t possible, and there are several other rules that must be followed: However, anyone hoping to prevent disasters will soon be disappointed. Yet there’s something very special about the café – you see, if you want to, you can travel in time…Īs bizarre as it may sound, there’s a special seat in the café, and once a day, when the right moment arrives, anyone wishing to take a trip can sit down, name a time, have a coffee poured and time travel. It’s a quiet place, small and rather old-fashioned, and the owners, Nagare and Kei, along with the young waitress Kazu, generally spend relaxing days attending to the needs of the few customers who drop by. Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold (translated by Geoffrey Trousselot, review copy courtesy of Picador) is set in a basement café called ‘Funiculi Funicula’ located down a dark Tokyo alleyway. You wouldn’t want to linger too long over your drink here – there are some serious consequences for staying in your seat for too long… ![]() Today’s review features another intriguing and slightly odd book to add to that list, with a story taking us off to Tokyo, and a coffee shop that offers a lot more than a quiet place to sip your mocha. Examples of this include Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, Yukiko Motoya’s The Lonesome Bodybuilder and, well, just about anything by Banana Yoshimoto. ![]() It might be the Murakami effect, but when it comes to the Japanese literature that makes it into English, you’re rarely short of something a little, shall we say, quirky. ![]()
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