Before the coffee gets cold

The book has a very soothing and warm feeling to it, as it is evident form
the title itself. The main theme of the book is about a café which allows it’s
customers to time travel, but there’s a twist to it. The twist being that a
person can travel into his/her past and future to change things but there are
four rules that must be strictly followed, otherwise the person who is time
travelling might get stuck there and become a ghost. The first rule is that
the person who is travelling need to sit on a specific seat, second rule being
that the person who’s going back or forwards to meet the other person
needs to have visited the café in the past or in the future, third being that
once arriving in the past or the future, one can’t move from the seat from
which he is seated upon, and lastly, the person has to drink the coffee before
it gets cold. Furthermore, once a person has travelled backwards or forwards
in time, there’s nothing he could do which could alter the present. One
might ask “what’s the point then?” The point is that it doesn’t matter if
the present can be changed or not, as long as the person can be changed.
This may sound very profound but to break it down, it basically means that
after looking back or in future, one may change his perspectives and
behaviours towards certain aspects of life or towards people, etc. Then
moving on, the book is divided into four short stories namely, ‘The Lovers’,
‘Husband and Wife’, ‘The Sisters’ and ‘Mother and Child’. The task of
sending customer of the café is done by a girl named Kazu who is a worker in
the café and is the sister-in-law of the café’s owner. The book really leaves
one gripped and in suspense of what will happen next and somehow all the
four stories are connected with each other and the good thing is that in the
first chapter itself, the characters have already been introduced by the
author to its reader. Ofc, the Japanese have a way with their uniqe way of
story-telling which leaves the reader in a sense of euphoria, nostalgia and ofc
wholesomeness.