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After five books, the repetition is finally bothering me. Every visitor is given the same rules, every cup of coffee creates the same countdown and every story is shaped towards a final emotional revelation. Even the characters’ hesitations and the explanations surrounding the journey have begun to feel overly familiar. I understand that repetition is part of the café’s ritual, but I'm now too aware of the construction underneath each story.

My main reservation, again, is the repetition. By this point in the series, I know the rules of the café extremely well. I knew them by the second explanation in this book, yet they continue to be restated. The same is true of the emotional structure. A visitor arrives carrying grief or regret. A meeting reveals information they didn't previously understand. The facts remain the same, but the visitor comes back able to face life differently.

Most time-travel fiction is concerned with consequences. A character changes one detail in the past and returns to discover an different present, but Kawaguchi removes that possibility entirely.