Bookn' with Friends: "Before the Coffee Gets Cold"

WPL's adult book club will gather for a discussion of Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi on Monday, April 27 at 6:00pm. Selected for the 2026 Reading Challenge topic "a translation," this Japanese novel was translated to English in 2015 by Geoffrey Trousselot. It is a gentle blend of time travel and magical realism, nudging readers to consider their own use of time.

From the publisher:

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which 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.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?