The fourth rule, finally, says that you can stay in the past as long as your coffee remains hot.įaced with these conditions, many customers give up on time travel. The third is that there is only one chair in the tiny cafe, from where time travel can occur and only when it is vacated by the ghost of a woman who gets up once a day to go to the bathroom. The second rule is that you can only go back in time within the walls of the café. What is the point, many cafe patrons think, of going back in time if the present is not changed? Many retreat in the face of this first, mandatory condition. The first is in some ways the most discouraging, namely, that the present cannot be changed. It tells a very enjoyable story that takes place entirely inside a tiny café in Tokyo, which holds a secret: the chance to travel through time.Ī few ironclad rules determine the conditions of the journey. If we could travel through time, to what period would we choose to return? Japanese writer Toshikazu Kawaguchi poses this and other questions in his novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold.
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