One of the more charming reads from last year was Before the Coffee Gets Cold, a short novel that falls into a mysterious genre called ‘magical realism’, as I’ve since learned. The setting and premise were simple yet inexplicable: in a small cafe in Tokyo, there is a single chair in the cafe that can take you to that same cafe at another point in time, under certain conditions and rules. The past can’t be changed, but — perhaps you can, by saying things that needed to be said, or asking questions that should have been voiced before. This collection seems shorter than the original, with only four stories, but there’s a good variety of pathos to be found here. We meet a young elementary school student who wishes he hadn’t cried at his parents’ divorce; a pair of unrequited lovers; a father and daughter estranged by her decision to elope with a man she barely knew but who her father could read like a book; and a young widow who wants her late husband to name their baby. As with the original, the novel’s narrative voice is directly philosophical, reflecting on the nature of regret, say, or the confusion and division within the human heart and the apparent fickleness that creates: these observations go hand in hand with the interior struggles we’re seeing as the characters make their journey into the past. Although the general tone is “sad but sweet”, there is some humor: possibly my favorite story involved two characters who delighted in speaking in the formal language of Samurai tales, which the translator renders as Shakespearean.