272 pages
English language
Published Jan. 7, 2021
In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that 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 café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn’t so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold.
Heartwarming, wistful, mysterious and delightfully quirky, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s internationally bestselling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time?
Un véritable coup de coeur ! J'y ai laissé quelques larmes, j'avoue, mais c'est si beau de voir que l'on peut trouver de petits bonheurs malgré la tristesse des évènements. Ce livre nous invite à remettre en perpective certaines situations, de créer nos propres petits bonheurs, de laisser nos remords et nos regrets derrière nous, mieux, de les accepter pour mieux vivre le présent.
I found the first story a bit slow, it took a bit of time to explain the rules so I wasn’t too sure I’d like it. Everything changed (to me) from the second story onwards.
The premise, there's a seat in a coffee shop that allows you to travel to any other moment in time. The constraints - you can't leave the seat, and you only have as long as a cup of coffee stays warm.
The rules of the café are a bit silly, and repeated a few too many times, but the characters and the themes of the book are warm as a good cup of coffee, charming as a small out of the way café, and mostly very sweet in a way that coffee isn't. A time travel story that makes the simple point that what we really want when we fantasize about doing it is not a change to change the world, but to speak with someone.
Worth the short read.
Molto commovente ma speravo meglio.
An easy to read and heartwarming story. It spoke to my sad soul and made me cry, so it must have been good.
Sweet, a simply staged play or radio drama, a very constrained time travel premise, seems it could have been edited to be a tighter novella, but the loose threads aren't too frayed.
