The past month has been a month of literary indulgence. I devoured eleven books, but there is one that’s stuck with me in a way I didn’t expect. ‘Tales from the Café’ by Toshikazu Kawaguchi.

There’s something quietly seismic about Kawaguchi’s writing. His prose doesn’t shout, it listens. It asks questions with the gentleness of steam rising from a cup and yet the answers land with the weight of lives half-lived, regrets unspoken, love left lingering in doorways we didn’t return to.

In this little Tokyo café where time travel is possible – but only in the most delicate, disciplined way – Kawaguchi offers stories not of grand adventures, but of inner reckonings. It’s not about changing the past. It’s about understanding it. Accepting it. Letting it hurt and then letting it heal.

What moved me most is how each character’s journey reminded me that our everyday choices are tiny acts of time travel, too. The things we say, or don’t say, echo forward. The people we love, the ones we miss, the ones we never got to know quite enough, they all become stories we carry, cafés we return to in our minds when we need warmth, or clarity, or closure.

It’s a gentle book. But like the best kinds of quiet, it lingers. It makes you pause before rushing off to the next thing. And it left me with one deeply human truth: time doesn’t need to be rewritten. It just needs to be remembered, honestly and with heart.

PS: I don’t think I’ll ever look at coffee – or time – the same way again.