Tales from the Cafe

About

In a back-alley Tokyo cafe that has served coffee for over a century, certain seats allow customers to travel back in time — but only for as long as their coffee stays warm. In this companion to Before the Coffee Gets Cold, four new visitors take their turns in the chair, each carrying a conversation they never had or a goodbye they need to say. Kawaguchi's formula is deceptively simple: one chair, one cup, one rule. But within those constraints, he finds genuine emotional territory — the stories work because the time travel is less about changing the past than about changing how a person carries it. A gentle book about the things we'd say if we had one more chance — and the strange comfort of learning that saying them doesn't fix everything.