“If you could go back, who would you want to meet?” This epigraph is simply all that needs to be asked before stepping into the cafe depicted in “Before the coffee gets cold.” Written by former producer, writer, and director for the Sonic Snail theatrical group Toshikazu Kawaguchi, this breakout semi-anthological novel portrays a cafe where it is possible to return to the past.

Toshikazu plays with science fiction and fantasy artfully, outlining a simple and easily comprehensible magic system that gives way to much larger stories of life, grief, and regret. Time travel in fiction is a pesky thing filled with contradictions and complexities, but Toshikazu lays out a system of time travel that is unconvoluted and beautifully simple: there are just five rules. As the cafe’s waitress explains in the book’s first few pages, there is no leaving the cafe in the past, therefore you can only meet whomever has been to the cafe before, and under no circumstances can you alter the present by visiting the past. By removing the possibility of cause and effect, Toshikazu creates a story where the time travel is secondary to the development of characters.