Before the coffee gets cold is a story about a cafe in modern Japan in which customers have the magical but inconvenient power to travel through time. There’s a set of rules that govern time travel, and they’re annoying enough that time travel is not all that appealing; one of the rules is that one must return from time travel before one’s cup of coffee goes cold, hence the title. It’s an interesting idea, and the uses customers find for this rather limited power are charming and endearing in their own way, but the writing is spare and tedious.

The book is composed of four stories, each roughly the same - someone toys with the idea of time travel, bristles at the arbitrary rules, but overcomes annoyance to take the plunge. In addition to the time limit there’s also a positional limit - customers must be in a special seat to travel through time, and they may not leave that seat throughout the experience. As with any other time travel story, characters can’t change the past or the future. On the whole it’s limiting and unexciting, as you’d imagine!

The point of the story, and of all these rules, is to explore historical reconstruction. Characters go back in time (and in one case, forward); they cannot change the trajectory of history but they can change their feeling and experience of it, and that’s something. I like it and I can relate to it. As far as that goes we all have time machines of our own, which is to say the ability to revisit our memories and reconstruct our understanding of them. So the book is relatable, and the kinds of reconstruction that happen are perhaps a little cliche but worthwhile nonetheless.

The book is pretty short, but despite that it feels too long and ponderous. Characters say the same thing over and over again, they are all rather dim and take their sweet time figuring out fairly obvious conclusions, they have the same reaction (“gave a small nod”) for just about any occasion, and at the end of the day it’s a boring read. It’s not the worst use of one’s time, but I wouldn’t recommend it too highly.