Before We Say Goodbye by Toshikazu Kawaguchi is the latest book set in the magical time-travelling Funiculi Funicula café. Translated from its original Japanese, it follows its highly successful predecessors, Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Tales from the Café. There’s also Before Your Memory Fades but I haven’t read that one!
Opening sentence: ‘So, there’s nothing one could do to change the present?’
Four short stories
Before We Say Goodbye is set a year after the first book in the series, Before the Coffee Gets Cold and is constructed as four short stories. The overarching theme is people who want to go back to the past in order to change something in their present. But that is very much not in the rules of time travel here. Nothing you do in the past can affect the future. They have to asses and deal with their grief and regrets in other ways.
The first story is about a husband who regrets his selfish ways, the second focuses on the love of a couple for their dog, the third is about an engaged couple who have crossed-wires and the last tale was about people caught up in the 2011 earthquake.
An emotional trip
While I will say it felt a little repetitive when it came to explaining the cafe’s time-travel rules in each story (due to them originally being published as separate stories) each made up for that by packing such a unique emotional punch and delivering a beautiful little moral message.
As is Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s signature of this series, in Before We Say Goodbye, the scene is set quickly but in such a way that you are drawn immediately in and know the tears will be pricking the corners of your eyes before too long. A heart-warming way to spend a few hours.
- Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC;
- Get your copy of Before We Say Goodbye here;
- Published by Pan Macmillan;
- 192 pages;
- My rating:
Books on the 7:47 
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