If you could return to one moment in your past but you couldn't change anything that happened, who would you choose to see?
That's the question waiting inside Café Funiculi Funicula, the small and rather unusual Tokyo café at the centre of Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold series. Hidden in a back alley and mostly untouched by the passing years, it offers certain customers the chance to travel through time.
But, of course there are rules:
1) The traveller has to sit in one particular chair.
2) They can't leave that chair while visiting the past or the future.
3) They can only meet someone who's been to the café before.
4) Nothing they say or do will alter the present.
5) Most importantly, they have to finish their coffee before it grows cold.
Tales from the Café is the second book in the series and takes us back to this familiar setting with four new visitors. Each one arrives with something that's unfinished: an unspoken truth, a missed farewell, a love interrupted, or a present that was never given.
I loved coming back to the café. I understood what these stories wanted to say and there were moments that truly moved me. But I also found myself held at arms length from the people whose grief I was being invited to share. The premise is of course as compelling as before, but the visible formula and constant repetition stopped this from becoming the deeply moving reading experience it could have been.
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.
At first, this makes travelling through time seem meaningless. Why go through the experience if the person you love is still going to die? Why revisit to a painful time when nothing can be stopped?
The answer is found in the difference between changing the event and changing your understanding of it.
The visitors to Café Funiculi Funicula aren't trapped because the past stays the same, but they're trapped by guilt, misunderstanding and everything they've had the chance or the courage to say. Their short trips allow them to find that some of the beliefs governing their lives aren't quite true.
The adoptive father believes that hiding his daughter’s parentage has made him unworthy of remaining her father. The grieving son believes that his failures have left him with nothing worth living for. The retired detective has spent thirty years treating his wife’s death as a punishment he deserves.
None of them can change what happened. But they can stop structuring the rest of their lives around their self-imposed sentences.
I connected with that that idea far more than the mechanics of the time travel premise itself.
Remorse often convinces us that if something can't be undone then neither can its consequences. Tales from the Café argues that this isn't always the case. We might not be able to change the past but we can rethink the meaning we've assigned to it.
The café is an effective setting because grief is made physical within it.
A person has to wait for the correct chair. The coffee is poured with precision. Time is measured by dissipating heat. The traveller can't pace the room, chase after the person they've lost or stay indefinitely inside the reunion. They have to sit still and accept that the conversation will end.
That restraint is truly beautiful.
The coffee ceremony gives shape to experiences that are otherwise impossible to control. The ritual doesn't take the grief away, but contains it for long enough that the traveller can finally see it.
The four distinct seasons give another underlying structure. Time moves forward outside the café even while its visitors are trying to reach back. Life continues whether they're ready for it or not.
These details help the book keep its comforting atmosphere in spite of the seriousness of its subjects. Death, cancer, suicide, pregnancy loss and parental bereavement all appear within its pages, but Kawaguchi handles them gently. Readers looking for consolation are likely to find a great deal here.
Although the book is presented as four stories about four visitors, the most successful narrative belongs to Kazu, who is the waitress responsible for pouring the coffee.
In the first book she was an intriguing but emotionally guarded character. Tales from the Café gradually exposes the reason for that reserve and gives her a much more substantial role.
Kazu has spent years living with the guilt connected to her mother, Kaname, who is the woman in white in the time-travel chair as the café’s resident ghost. Her precise performance of the coffee ritual isn't just a responsibility. It 's become a form of penance.
This revelation gives the novel a cohesion I didn't always find in the individual stories. While visitors enter and leave, Kazu remains. Their experiences eventually illuminate her own until the book’s real question becomes: can she accept the lesson she's helped so many other people learn?
Her story also complicates the repeated message about choosing happiness. In Kazu’s case, happiness doesn't mean denying what happened or suddenly becoming free of grief. It means seeing that suffering isn't proof of love and that continuing to punish herself won't restore her mother.
I would have liked even more time with her. The café staff are much more interesting to me than some of the visitors because their relationships have room to expand across the entire book.
The Tales from the Cafe is filled with many elements to enjoy. Its central idea is thoughtful and its treatment of loss is compassionate. The café is an appealing place to revisit and Kazu’s developing story adds an emotional continuity that strengthens the series.
Several scenes truly came very close to undoing me. The idea of one final conversation with someone who's died is almost impossible to approach without thinking about our own losses and the words we might still want to say.
But being moved by the premise isn't quite the same as being fully moved by the writing.
headed and often I could also see exactly how it was meant to make me feel. The repeated rules slowed the flow and the limited time with each visitor made their emotional transformations feel more choreographed than discovered.
Three stars doesn't mean that I didn't like this book. It means I can see its value but I can also seeing the distance between what it wanted to achieve and what it actually did.
Readers who loved the structure and emotional directness of Before the Coffee Gets Cold will probably find this sequel reassuringly familiar, and those who thought the first book was repetitive or overly sentimental aren't likely to be persuaded by the second.
For me, my favourite element wasn't the possibility of travelling through time. It was the reminder that guilt can become another way of refusing to say goodbye. Sometimes we keep punishing ourselves because letting go feels too much like leaving the person behind.
Tales from the Café understands that fear. I just wish it had trusted its stories enough to leave more of that understanding unspoken.
☕ Read this if you enjoy gentle Japanese fiction and magical realism
⏳ Four interconnected stories shaped by time travel and strict rules
💞 Final conversations with friends family and lost loves
🫶 Grief regret forgiveness and learning how to move forward
🌸 A warm reflective story about changing yourself rather than the past
⚠️ Contains death grief cancer suicidal thoughts and pregnancy loss
Book Details
Tales From the Cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Paperback ISBN
978-1529050868 — Picador paperback edition published in Australia on 29 September 2020.
Hardcover ISBN
978-1035053766 — Picador collectible hardcover edition published in Australia on 8 October 2024.
eBook ISBN
978-1760983109 — Picador digital eBook edition published in Australia on 29 September 2020.
Audiobook ISBN
978-1761686290 — Macmillan Digital Audio unabridged audiobook edition published on 17 September 2020.
Genre
Translated Fiction; Contemporary Fiction; Magical Realism; Literary Fiction; Fantasy; Time-Travel Fiction; Japanese Fiction
Subgenre
Contemporary Japanese Fiction; Philosophical Fiction; Speculative Fiction; Café Fiction; Grief Fiction; Interconnected Stories; Domestic Fiction; Healing Fiction
Tropes / Literary Threads
Time travel with strict rules; return before the coffee gets cold; the past cannot be changed; final conversations; reunion with lost loved ones; unresolved grief; regret and forgiveness; second chances; interconnected strangers; found family; inherited magic.
Publisher
Picador — an imprint of Pan Macmillan — publishes the paperback, hardcover and digital editions currently sold in Australia.
SeriesB
efore the Coffee Gets Cold, Book Two — preceded by Before the Coffee Gets Cold and followed by Before Your Memory Fades, Before We Say Goodbye, Before We Forget Kindness and Before I Knew I Loved You.
Formats Available
Paperback; Collectible Hardcover; eBook; Kindle; EPUB; Unabridged Digital Audiobook.
Audiobook Narrator
Kevin Shen
Audiobook Length
Approximately 5 hours and 33 minutes for the unabridged English-language recording.
Original Release Date
20 March 2017 — first published in Japan by Sunmark Publishing under the title Kono Uso ga Barenai Uchi ni.
Australian Release Date
29 September 2020 — Picador paperback and digital eBook editions released in Australia.
Page Count
224 pages — Picador paperback edition with ISBN 978-1529050868.
Where to BuyTales From the Cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
📚 Amazon
Affiliate Disclosure
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Danielle Robinson is a literary critic and writer whose
work explores literature through the
lens of atmosphere, memory, culture, and emotional experience. Holding a double degree in philosophy and theology, she combines academic insight with a deeply refined aesthetic sensibility shaped by more than three decades working across the creative industries as an internationally published, multi-award-winning makeup artist, fashion stylist, and interior stager.
She reads widely and rigorously, reading and reviewing more than 200 books each year as both an ARC reader and commissioned critic. Through Silk & Sentences, Danielle approaches literature as something immersive and lived with — not simply stories to consume, but works that shape the way we think, feel, and move through the world.
She writes from her semi-rural Queensland home, where she lives with Alex, her husband of 33 years, their dogs Oscar and Paige, and an ever-growing library of books.
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