Tales From the Cafe

Image credit: Goodreads

Still well and truly entrenched in this wondrous new reading groove, this week I have gone back to fiction and revisited a charming little café in Tokyo that allows you to travel through time. A bittersweet cosy novel, Tales From the Café is the second book in Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold series.

Hidden away from the hustle and bustle of Tokyo is a tiny little café that allows you to travel through time. There are a number of rules and caveats attached, but even so people who hear the urban legend find their way there to travel to the past and perform one deed that could change their future. Like Gohtaro who goes back 22 years to record a wedding message for his adopted daughter from her real father. Or Yukio or travels to see his dead mother before she is hospitalised. Katsuki visits the future see if the lover he left behind is happy, and Kiyoshi travels thirty years back to give his dead wife a birthday present. These people can’t change the dark events that inspired these meetings, they have just enough time to do one act or have one conversation that can change their outlook on the future; help them find and inspire happiness with each new day.

Similar to the first book: Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Tales From the Café is a collection of five little stories that deal with sad themes of loss, bereavement, death, and post-traumatic stress and sees the characters put themselves in a unique situation in an attempt to find emotional clarity and happiness. Usually, the protagonist travels through time with a plan and often that plan gets upended by something the visited party says or does that shifts the hero’s mindset. There are four stories told in four chapters, with an overarching story of the café’s staff running parallel.

Kawaguchi’s simple prose is immersive and transportive, and inspires readers to put themselves in the heroes’ shoes and ask what would I do or say if I was going to meet with the dead? The unique, science-fiction quirk of the novel’s setting is discussed in such a delightful, nonchalant way that makes the true message about the beauty of life and everyone’s deserving happiness really shine through.

Image credit: Pan Macmillan

It’s been a few years since I read the first novel and so I did worry that my reading experience would be smudged a little but my memory trying to dredge up the ins and outs of the setting and its inhabitants, but I was able to pick up Tales From the Café and immediately fall into pace with it, no mental jogging required. Filled with grief, compassion, and love, it’s a lovely afternoon read.

Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi, 2017

Translated by Geoffre Trousselot, 2020

Published: Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, London, 2020.

Tales From the Cafe is the second book in Toshikazu Kawaguchi's Before the Coffee Gets Cold series.