There is a little underground cafe in Tokyo where, if you sit at a certain chair under the right conditions, you can find yourself in that chair in that cafe at some other time, where you can meet someone who was in that cafe at that time. You cannot change the past, but you can revisit it: you can see someone who is now gone, ask questions that lingered on the tip of your tongue for too long but never found life in breath. What happens in that seat cannot change the past, but it can change you — but you have to make the most of the time, completing your business before the time-changing coffee before you grows cold.

This is a fascinating little volume of stories, all tied to the same place: a chair that inexplicably serves as a limited time-travel device when paired with a certain blend of coffee. There are many rules to this travel: you can’t move from the seat when you arrive in the past, you have to be there to meet someone who was there in that moment, etc. In addition to the rules, there is a challenge: there is a ghost in the chair, a woman in white intently reading a book who responds to no one but the shop owner, who offers her periodic refills. She doesn’t look like a ghost — she looks human and living, and she’s physical to the point of being touchable – but she’s otherwordly, and only when she takes a brief bathroom break can anyone else saddle up and sally forth into time. Given the limitations — and the risk of being trapped like the woman in white – only someone who had serious emotional baggage to unpack would dare try, and those are the stories we get here. The stories are often sad, but sweet, and there are interconnections. One character, for instance, is a steady presence in the cafe, appearing in every story: we learn in a later piece that he continues coming in hopes of going back to see his wife so he can give her a letter, but how we learn this is that his wife comes in to go back in time herself: he has Alzheimers, and she wants to return to when he didn’t so she can find out what letter he’s wanting to give her.  I most appreciated the fact that this is not a series of set pieces in which the cafe owner meets a series of randos who want to time-travel: most of the characters appear in several stories because they’re regulars of the cafe, and their lives are bound up together. The interconnectedness makes the cafe and the people’s dramas feel real, despite the fantasy elements like the woman in white.

This was a fascinating little collection of stories, and I see that it’s part of a series which I may continue exploring.