Toshikazu Kawaguchi

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café that 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 back in time.

From the author of Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Tales from the Cafe comes another story of four new customers, each of whom is hoping to take advantage of Café Funiculi Funicula's time-travelling offer. Among some familiar faces from Kawaguchi's previous novels, readers will also be introduced to a daughter, a comedian, a sister, and a lover, each with something they wish they had said differently.

With his signature heartwarming characters and immersive storytelling, Kawaguchi once again invites the reader to ask themselves: what would you change if you could travel back in time?

A Novel

Before Your Memory Fades

思い出が消えないうちに

Jemima Scott

Is just that I'm worried that you will forget how to smile when I die...

Clara Concejo

If the world were to end tomorrow, which would you do?

"Is just that I'm worried that you will forget how to smile when I die...”

"I get the sense that Reiko is hounded by the anxiety of death. Like she is struggling with not knowing when or understanding why people die."

"If it was just a matter of travelling back to the past, anyone could do it. But this cafe chooses people...by its rules...and some people hear those rules and give up. But those people who are resolved to go back, despite the rules, have a reason for doing so. It doesn't matter what that reason is. If there is someone they must see, or someone they should see...even if the present reality won't change...then, that's all that matters."

Something I strong believe is that we mustn't allow the death of a person to be the cause of unhappiness. The reason for that is simple: if we let everyone who dies be a cause of unhappiness, that would mean people are born to become unhappy. But the opposite is in fact true. People are always born for the sake of happiness.

Ingrid

因為，自己一個人活下來的話，就跟自己一個人死掉是一樣的啊！

想回到過去的人都有不同的理由，那些理由是好是壞，沒有任何人有權力評斷，任憑個人自由。

沒有任何人理解自己的心情，到頭來我還是得自己一個人活下去。她將自己的心緊緊地封閉起來。

Before Your Memory Fades quotes

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