Before the Coffee Gets Cold

What would you do if you could go back in 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 in time.

In Before the coffee gets cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’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
- 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 . . .

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?