Before the Coffee gets cold - A Japanese Book

Time Travel often involves complicated science because the director wants to give an authentic experience for the viewers to believe that there is a faint chance this is possible. I remember reading about Interstellar in Times that Christopher Nolan had scientists & physicists on board to give a true picture. 

Unlike the complexity of the movies or other science fiction books like The 3 body problem for example, this book has a simple premise - If you could go back, who would you want to meet ?

Here time travel is more of an emotional travel to connect or forgive or understand a relationship. It’s set up in a cafe where there is a unique chair where you have to sit and there are rules for you to travel in time. I will not go into specifics as it will spoil the fun of someone who is reading it, but the set up is really interesting as there are rules which one has to follow if they are travelling. 

The characters, like all of us, are flawed and have done something which they feel can correct or find out by travelling back in time, knowing very well that whatever they do ‘the present cannot be changed’. The characters are all very simple middle class folks like you and me and the authors sketch them out beautifully. 

I am very fond of Japanese novels and read many of them and one of the common traits I find is that they are very simple and have very simple lifestyles, they are very hard working, have very strong ethics and family values. The same is true here. 

There are 4 short stories but the characters in all 4 stories are the same - which you do not realise in the start but the author is able to generate a feeling that these stories are happening between a few close friends. It’s like a few friends are getting together after a long time and sharing stories. I liked it a lot.

Back to Future is one movie which is my favourite & I had seen it growing up & I still loved Michel J Fox in that. 

Whom would I want to meet or be at an incident if I could go back.

I would like to meet Maa, my MOM who died in 2012 quite suddenly. Since I moved out of Delhi in 2006, our interactions were only when we went to meet her or she and baba came over to meet us. She spent the last year or two of her life in loneliness, as she became more and more immobile because of multiple fractures in her hand and differences with baba which took a very negative turn. She kept away from most of her friends and spent her last 1 or 2 years in loneliness. I was busy shaping my life with 2 small children, a new job & a new city and never saw this coming. She loved celebrating birthdays and maybe I would like to visit her on her birthday and talk to her for a whole day. 

The only thing I have to do is find the cafe now which allows for time travel :)