Paperback, 272 pages
English language
Published Jan. 7, 2021 by Hanover Square Press.
In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee—the chance to travel back in time.
Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn’t so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold.
Heartwarming, wistful, mysterious and delightfully quirky, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s internationally bestselling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time?
A nice, short book about a possibility to time travel in a small cafe. But the time travelling comes with a lot of rules, and nothing you do while time travelling will change the current state of things. It is a nice and easy read with varying stories for the characters.
Ein berührendes Buch mit fein und doch gradlinig entwickelten Episoden, die von viel Menschlichem erzählen und eindeutig dafür plädieren, sich immer wieder für das Leben zu entscheiden. Die Zeit ist dabei ein unerbittlicher, aber neutraler Protagonist. Ihr Wert, ihre Bedeutung und die ihr innewohnende Dramatik, manchmal auch Grausamkeit, wird deutlich. Die Entwicklungen sind manchmal etwas zu offensichtlich und absehbar, die Regeln der Zeitreisen werden in jeder Episode z.T. mehrfach wiederholt, was etwas lästig ist.
Trotz der Kritikpunkte ein Buch, was mich nachdenklich machte, aber auch gut unterhalten hat.
A beautiful read. A bunch of mini stories, thatI transported me to a cafe in Japan. Sometimes it goes too much into detail, which normally is a bit slow for me, but in this case it help with character build up and somehow the author kept me entertained
Eg var usikker i starten. Forstod ikkje heilt "greia." Men jo lengre eg las, jo klarare ble det.
Boka er strukturert i fire mindre historiar, som får boka til å kjennast kort og fin, samtidig som alle historiane er kobla i lag.
Emosjonell. Fin. Morosam.
I didn’t have high hopes for this book because I’m jaded when it comes to how women are portrayed in Japanese media, and it didn’t help that the author was a man. I was willing to give it a chance though (well, tbh it was our book club’s pick so I kind of didn’t have a choice), but I found the story uninspired, filled with stereotypical characterization I’ve encountered in Japanese stories. Maybe, just maybe, Japanese men should let Japanese women tell stories about themselves and their experiences.
Edit: I did’t even go into the actual writing. Technically, this was bad. So much repetition and unnecessary descriptions.
The premise, there's a seat in a coffee shop that allows you to travel to any other moment in time. The constraints - you can't leave the seat, and you only have as long as a cup of coffee stays warm.
The rules of the café are a bit silly, and repeated a few too many times, but the characters and the themes of the book are warm as a good cup of coffee, charming as a small out of the way café, and mostly very sweet in a way that coffee isn't. A time travel story that makes the simple point that what we really want when we fantasize about doing it is not a change to change the world, but to speak with someone.
Worth the short read.
I'm impatient these days. I read to relax and enjoy and escape the world's daily toils. And I'm not getting any younger. So I abandoned it after a couple of attempts. But maybe you love it, who knows!
A little gem of a book, given to me by a bright and doomed girl in loving affection - so how could it not resonate?
An easy to read and heartwarming story. It spoke to my sad soul and made me cry, so it must have been good.
I like the time travel rules! But everything else? Hoo man. It’s! Not great. I wasn’t surprised to find that the author originally was a playwright.
Very delicate book, and as I was commenting with a friend it probably loses something in the translation. I wouldn't say it's a masterpiece and being a bestseller I was expecting something more from it, but it is a nice read. It explores joys and sorrows of human life through the lens of a café in Tokyo, interestingly named after a Neapolitan traditional song (!) which has the magic ability to let people travel in time.
This started slow for me, but I did eventually get into it. It could easily be staged as a play, and I think the time travel piece is somewhat interesting (though, the author does try to get around the inevitable plot holes of a time travel story with a series of unexplained "rules").
More of a 3.5, but pretty good.
Sweet, a simply staged play or radio drama, a very constrained time travel premise, seems it could have been edited to be a tighter novella, but the loose threads aren't too frayed.
This wasn't for me. Lots of repetition, and each short story seemed designed to tug at your heart strings, but was too predictable to do so. Extremely boring messaging, with lots of female characters sacrificing themselves. I wanted them to explore the rules and the woman in the dress, but they never did. Very on the surface. Not a single cat (as pictured on the cover).
