A review, and a confession.
I recall seeing Before the Coffee Gets Cold in a few book stores – always quietly vying for attention. Restrained. I always meant to pick up but never did. Finally, I came to it the way most people come to anything they’ve been meaning to read — sideways, accidentally, through an audiobook. It was my first fiction audiobook on audible.com. I’m still not sure I was ready for it.
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s novel is set almost entirely inside a single Tokyo café where, if you sit in a particular chair at a particular moment, you can travel back in time. The rule — the one rule that holds everything together — is this: you can go back, you can sit with the person you lost or failed or never said the right thing to, but when you return, nothing will have changed. The present stays the present. Whatever you do in the past, the world moves on without revision. And you cannot change your seat, and you need to come back before the coffee gets cold, and there is a ghost.
When I first heard these rules, I thought: what a frustrating premise. What is the point of going back if nothing changes?
By the end, I understood. The constraint is the point. Going back is not about fixing anything. It is about finishing something — a sentence left hanging, a feeling never named, a goodbye that came too soon or too late. The story that stayed with me longest was the couple who drifted apart. Not a dramatic rupture, no single moment of betrayal — just time, doing what time does quietly. And then the chair, and the coffee, and a few minutes to sit across from someone and say what you actually meant. Exchanging a letter written before dementia erases memories and as a result life itself.
It is a gentle book. Hopeful in a way that good speculative fiction rarely allows itself to be. It does not reach for the sublime. It reaches for the ordinary — for the things we left unsaid over coffee that got cold while we were busy being afraid.
On the audiobook
The format was gentle in its pacing, which suited the material. But I think I would have felt more with a physical copy in hand. There is something about holding a quiet book that the format alone cannot replicate — the silence between sentences matters in Kawaguchi, and on audio, that silence has to compete with the world around you. Still, as a first foray into fiction audiobooks, it was the right place to start.
A writer’s aside
I have written about time travel too. In What Goes Around Comes Around — a story from The Sigh of Shards — a theoretical physicist stands before the World Congress with nine minutes on a watch running backwards, arguing for a vote on whether humanity should use time travel at all. She has already invented it. She cannot un-invent it. Her dilemma is the mirror image of Kawaguchi’s café: not should I go back, but should this exist at all.
Both stories, I think, arrive at the same place. Time travel as a premise is rarely about time. It is about regret — the things we carried without resolution. Neither a café chair nor a planetary vote can dissolve that weight. But sitting with it, naming it, is perhaps enough.
You can read What Goes Around Comes Around — also published as One Second Per Second on Reedsy — on the Short Fiction page.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. Translated by Geoffrey Trousselot. Recommended — slowly, with something warm in your hands and you fill finish it before the coffee gets cold.
Rohit Pruthi 
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