Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot, Toshikazu Kawaguchi`s beautiful, moving Before the Coffee Gets Cold explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the cafe`s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer`s, see their sister one last time, and meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the cafe, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold…