Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi – The Million-Copy Global Bestseller (Original English Edition).

If you could travel back in time, who would you want to meet?

Tucked away in a quiet alleyway of Tokyo, café Funiculi Funicula has been serving carefully brewed coffee for over a century. But this cozy spot offers more than caffeine: it grants customers the rare opportunity to travel through time.

Yet time travel comes with severe restrictions:

• You can only sit in one specific seat.

• You cannot leave the chair while in the past.

• Nothing you do will alter the reality of the present.

• Most importantly, you must finish your coffee and return before it gets cold—or remain trapped in the past as a ghost forever.

Across four deeply moving, interconnected stories, Kawaguchi introduces four visitors hoping to use the chair: a woman seeking closure with the lover who walked away, a nurse looking to retrieve a letter from her husband before early-onset Alzheimer’s erased his memories, a sister wishing to apologize to the sibling she avoided, and a pregnant mother desperate to meet the daughter she may never raise. Exploring regret, grief, forgiveness, and love, this gentle fable reminds us that while the past cannot be changed, how we carry it into the future changes everything.