Il Primo Caffé della Giornata Scegli la Tua Sedia Preferita by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

 Il Primo Caffé della Giornata Scegli la Tua Sedia Preferita by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

is the sequel of "Finché Il Caffè è Caldo" published by Garzanti.

Interesting, magical book, I found it enchanting. It is moving, I cried, I participated to these stories told with simplicity and at the same time tenderness.  There is not the same poetry that maybe this book would have with less dialogues and more descriptions, but it enters in the heart.

There is in the city of Tokyo a discreet, little cafè where people love to spend some time enjoying a good cup of green or black tea chatting, socializing or simply meeting some friends during the day. A special corner of the cafè is dedicated to temporal trips made by the most diversified people and for the most diversified reasons: they return in the past thanks to a magical coffeepot: drinking a cup of coffee (the trip starts when the person serves the coffee to the time-traveler) from that coffeepot people return in the past. They must know that they can't change their destiny or the one of the person that they want to re-meet in that café in a precise instant of the past: simply, they can still enjoy their presence, clarifying, trying to understand why their path has been a path of sufferance, for living a best present and a peaceful future; living with resignation and courage what it is lost, and much much more.

The guidelines of these special meetings with the past are simple: the person must drink the coffee still warm for return home safely; in opposite case he/she would become a ghost; people must remember that they can't change the past: they must remain sat, and they can only meet only people who had been in the café because these meetings have, de fact, the café as location. Nagare became with the time the owner of the café helped by other relatives when her mother left the activity for going in America. Everyone in the café know this particularity and magical time-experience and no one is surprised by it.

In general people must wait some time before to start these trips in the past, because there is a gentleman, a phantom, constantly sat in that special chair, and the chair becomes free only when he must go to the bathroom. No one knows why there is this ritual, being a phantom, but every place has its particularities, stories, special people...Or phantoms! 

Beautiful!

Original reading!

Highly recommended.

I thank Garzanti for the copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

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