Or: Ten Things a Japanese Novel Told Me About Time, None of Which I Have Successfully Applied

Toshikazu Kawaguchi — Observations from the Corner Table of a Reader Who Cannot Stop Checking the Time

“No matter what you do, the coffee will get cold. The question is whether you drink it while it is still warm.”

— Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold

I. The Café, the Diary, and the Tuesday in January

The book came to my attention on a Tuesday in January, which is as unremarkable a day as exists in the calendar. Tuesday has no ceremony attached to it. It is not the fresh beginning of Monday, nor has it the merciful proximity to the weekend that Wednesday offers. Tuesday simply is, which is perhaps why I read on a Tuesday more honestly than on any other day. There is nothing to perform for.

I had been writing in my diary — the thick-paged one I begin every January with great ambition and abandon by February with equal speed — when I came to Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s name. I wrote it carefully. Toshikazu Kawaguchi. A man who has written a novel about a café in Tokyo where a particular chair allows you to travel back in time. With conditions. You cannot leave the chair. You cannot change anything, no matter what you do. And the coffee gets cold whether you act or not.

I want to be clear about the premise, because it sounds, in summary, like the kind of thing that gets dismissed in a sentence. In practice it is not dismissible. In practice, the impossibility of changing anything is precisely what makes the time travel matter. What you can do, in that chair, is say the thing you did not say. Hear the thing you needed to hear. Close the distance that life — with its ordinary, daily, unremarkable indifference — had opened between you and someone else.

I read the first chapter. I set the book down. I looked at the ceiling for some time.

I had several phone calls I had been meaning to make.

II. The Ten Things, and What I Did with Them

I am a person who makes notes. Not because I am disciplined — the diary is evidence against that reading — but because some books require the record. They say something and you need proof that it was said, because otherwise the mind, which is in the business of softening things it finds uncomfortable, will round the edges off by morning.

The notes from Kawaguchi’s book ran to three pages of my diary. Three days of January. The handwriting got worse as the lessons got more accurate.

1.  Cherish the Present Moment

Live in the present, Kawaguchi says. Time is fleeting. Opportunities may be lost if not seized.

This is the kind of sentence that lives on motivational posters above office printers, and one tends to read it with the same attention one gives the fire exit instructions — noted, filed, not expected to be personally relevant.

What Kawaguchi does, which the motivational poster does not, is show you the cost. His characters sit in a café because they missed the present when they had it. They go back not because the past is better but because they were not there for it when it was happening. They were elsewhere — planning, worrying, managing, performing — and the moment, which required only their presence, left without them.

I thought about the last dinner with my family where I had been sitting at the table and also, simultaneously, somewhere else entirely. Present in body. Absent in the way that counts.

I did not write a neat conclusion to this thought. I left it as a question.

2.  Communicate Your Feelings

The characters in the novel grapple with unexpressed emotions. Suffering from missed opportunities to communicate their feelings to loved ones.

This is the one that requires the least explanation and the most courage.

We are, most of us, trained from childhood in the art of not saying the thing. The family I grew up in communicated through implication, through the tone of chai being placed on the table, through who sat where at dinner. Love was present in the cooking. Frustration was present in the silence. Nobody said either directly, and we all understood perfectly, and we all also misunderstood frequently and catastrophically.

The characters in Kawaguchi’s café go back to say: I was proud of you. I am sorry. I loved you and I assumed you knew. They say this to people who can no longer change anything as a result of hearing it. The hearing is still the point.

I have three unfinished sentences in my drafts folder that have been there for over a year. They are addressed to people who are still alive and still reachable. I remain, as the folder indicates, in draft.

3.  Acceptance and Forgiveness

Heals past wounds and finds peace with oneself and others.

There is a particular kind of wound that does not ache unless you press it. You can go weeks, months, without noticing it. And then someone says a thing — a word, a name, a specific arrangement of circumstances — and there it is. Unchanged. Still tender in exactly the same place.

Kawaguchi does not suggest that forgiveness makes the wound disappear. His café does not deal in erasure. What it deals in is something smaller and more durable: the possibility of sitting with what happened and deciding, slowly, to stop pressing the bruise.

I have a list of things I have decided to forgive and have not yet forgiven. The list is longer than I would like it to be. The deciding, I am told, is the beginning. I remain at the beginning.

4.  Value Relationships

Human connections shape our lives. Nurture and cherish relationships with family, friends, and loved ones.

I wrote next to this in the diary: obvious. And then I wrote: and yet.

Because it is obvious. It has always been obvious. We know this the way we know that vegetables are good and sleep matters and one should not read alarming news at midnight. The knowing is not the issue. The issue is the Tuesday afternoons when we choose the easier thing — the phone, the show, the comfortable solitude — over the harder and more important thing, which is to call the person, visit the relative, sit with the friend who has been quietly struggling and has not said so because we have not asked.

The relationships are not waiting on a shelf. They are made of time, which is exactly what we spent on something else.

The coffee, meanwhile, gets cold.

5.  Embrace Second Chances

Despite the constraints of time travel in the story, characters are given the opportunity for second chances — to reconcile with their pasts and make amends. Embrace the possibility of redemption and growth.

The café in the novel offers second chances under strict conditions. You may go back. You may not change what happened. You may only respond to it differently.

This is, when you hold it in the correct light, not a fantasy at all. It is Tuesday. It is available to all of us. The past cannot be changed but your relationship with it — the story you tell about it, the weight you assign it, the degree to which you let it occupy the present — is revised continuously, whether you intend to or not.

The characters in the café choose to revise consciously. They sit in the chair and they do the harder arithmetic. They come back changed by what they already knew.

There is something in this I am still working out.

6.  Facing Regrets

Reflect on your own regrets and make peace with them.

There is a woman I knew in my thirties who used to say that she had no regrets, and she said it with the satisfaction of someone who has completed a difficult household task. No regrets. Done. Shelved.

I never believed her. Not because she was dishonest but because the claim requires a kind of stillness that very few people actually possess. Regrets are not filed and concluded. They surface at inconvenient moments — in the middle of conversations about unrelated things, at 3 a.m. when the rest of the world has the decency to be asleep, in the pause before answering the question: are you happy?

Kawaguchi does not ask his characters to be free of regrets. He asks them to face them. To sit with them, literally, in an old chair in a basement café, and look at them without flinching.

The facing, it turns out, is different from the carrying. Both involve the weight. Only one of them moves.

7.  Appreciate the Small Moments

Find joy and significance in the seemingly mundane moments of everyday life, as those moments often hold deep meaning and nostalgia.

The café itself is a small moment — the kind of place that exists in every city and is noticed by very few people. A basement. Certain chairs. The sound of a coffee machine. Nothing happens there, in the conventional sense. And yet people return to it across time itself, which suggests that the nothing that happens there is, in fact, the most important thing.

I have a tapri near my office — the one on the corner that has been there longer than the buildings around it and will probably outlast them too. The chai costs twelve rupees. I have had conversations there that I remember more clearly than meetings I prepared for with slides.

The small moments do not announce themselves. They do not say: this is the one you will think of later, when you are somewhere else entirely, wanting to be here. They are simply happening, and then they have happened, and then they are the ones you would go back to.

8.  Value Human Connection

Prioritise real life connections over technological distractions.

Kawaguchi’s café has a rule that does not appear in the novel but is implied by everything in it: you cannot be half-present. The chair offers full immersion or nothing. You cannot travel back in time while checking your notifications.

I thought about the last time I was fully in a conversation. Not managing it, not planning my next sentence, not monitoring the phone on the table with the peripheral attention of a security guard — but actually there, in the room, with the person in front of me.

It had been some time.

The novel does not moralize about this. It simply shows you what the full version looks like and leaves the comparison to you. The comparison is unflattering. This is the point.

9.  Live Authentically

Be true to themselves and live life on your own terms.

There is a version of your life that other people have been designing on your behalf since before you were old enough to object. It is assembled from their preferences, their anxieties, their definitions of what a good life looks like. It fits adequately. It fits the way a garment fits when it was made for someone built slightly differently — wearable, presentable, occasionally comfortable, never quite right.

The characters in Kawaguchi’s novel discover, in the café, what they actually wanted. Not what they were supposed to want. Not what they told people they wanted. The actual thing, which had been there the whole time, waiting with the patience of something that has nowhere else to go.

The authentic life is not dramatic. It does not require a reinvention or a resignation letter or a sabbatical in Rishikesh. It requires, mostly, a willingness to notice when you are performing and the courage to occasionally stop.

I am working on the noticing. The stopping comes later.

10.  Make Every Moment Count

Do not take anything for granted. Life is too short to be consumed by regrets and what-ifs.

This is the last lesson and also the first one, and also the one that contains all the others. It is the sentence that sits at the end of the book like a waiter who has been quietly observing your entire meal and now, as you are putting on your coat, says the thing that reframes everything.

What-ifs are the most expensive indulgence available to a human being. They cost nothing in the present and compound interest invisibly, until one day you are doing the accounting and discover that a significant portion of your interior life has been occupied by a version of events that never happened and cannot now.

The coffee, Kawaguchi’s café reminds you, will get cold. This is not a warning. It is just the nature of coffee. The question is not how to stop the cooling but whether, in the time you have, you are actually drinking.

III. What I Did When I Finished

I closed the diary. I sat with the book for a moment in the way you sit with something that has said several true things and is now waiting for you to do something about them.

Outside, the January afternoon was doing its usual work — the light already thinning by four o’clock, the street sounds arriving muffled through the window, the building across the road showing its lit windows one by one as the evening assembled itself. Somewhere below, a pressure cooker announced the end of its patience.

I picked up my phone. I put it down. I picked it up again.

I called my mother. Not because I had planned to. Not because there was something specific to say. Because the novel had reminded me that there will be a version of a future afternoon where I would go back — if such a thing were possible — to a January Tuesday when I could have called and didn’t. And the only way to keep that future afternoon uncrowded is to make the call now, while the coffee is still warm, while the option is still open, while the person on the other end is still there to receive it.

She answered immediately. She asked if I had eaten. I said yes. She did not believe me. We talked for twenty-two minutes about nothing that would matter to anyone but us, and everything that mattered completely.

This is, I think, what Kawaguchi’s café is actually for. Not the time travel. Not the dramatic reunions. The twenty-two minutes on a Tuesday. The call you make because a book reminded you that you meant to.

IV. Should You Read This Book?

Yes. With a condition of my own.

Read it somewhere you cannot check your phone easily. A train works. A café works — one with the old-fashioned charm of not being too loud, with chairs that suggest staying and a menu that does not require much deciding. Somewhere that has the quality of a place where things can be thought about properly.

The book will not give you the ability to travel back in time. It will not resolve your unfinished sentences or make the difficult call for you. It will not close the distance between you and the person you have been meaning to reach for longer than you care to admit.

What it will do is remind you, in the quiet and precise way of a book that knows how to leave things unsaid, that the chair exists. That the café is open. That the coffee is, at this exact moment, still warm.

The rest is yours to do.

P.S. — My mother, on the phone, told me I sounded tired and that I should sleep more and eat more vegetables. This is not what I expected. It is, however, what I needed. The books are usually right about these things.

P.P.S. — The tapri near my office now knows my name. This is either a sign of community or of a caffeine problem. Both are possible. Kawaguchi would probably say it is the former.

P.P.P.S. — There are still three unfinished sentences in my drafts folder. I am working on it. The working on it is, I am told, already something.