In Japan there is a coffee shop that has been open for more than a hundred years and many legends circulate about it. One rule: once seated, you have to finish the coffee before it gets cold.
It's a special, magical café. Legend has it that after a sip of coffee it is possible to relive that first wrong choice or that word that was better not to pronounce. An auspicious journey into the past.
Not everyone has the courage to enter, but once seated in front of a steaming cup you decide to go towards your destiny.
Many stories, each of which contains a regret or a painful memory, resurfaced after a sip of coffee. After finishing it, however, everyone realizes that the past is not important, but what matters is the time that passes between our hands, the present. That present in which one can still decide, one can make a decision, right or wrong. Life, like coffee, must be lived sip by sip, capturing every moment and detail.
Kawaguchi's novel represents us a real journey through time, a dive into the past of the protagonists of the story. What we dwell on after reading it is that our life travels on a straight line in which one can only go in one direction and it is useless to delve into an unsaid word or an avoidable action. Welcoming the past with serene acceptance is the mantra of these words.
The author's is a narrative with a simple and light touch, a dreamlike writing daughter of today's Japanese literature. A slight trepidation urges the reader to curiously discover the final outcome of the time travel, leaving a lesson in the heart of those who leaf through the last pages of "As long as the coffee is hot".
Reading this novel while sipping a steaming cup of coffee is the best way to fully immerse yourself in the author's words, on a cold winter day sitting comfortably on a bench in true oriental style .
