I've finished the sixth installment in Kawaguchi's time-traveling café series, translated once again by Geoffrey Trousselot. We're back at Funiculi Funicula in Tokyo, where one particular seat lets a visitor slip into the past — or, for the first time in the series, the future — under the same strict rules as always: you can only meet someone who has themselves visited the café, you can't leave the seat, nothing you do will change the present, and you have to finish your coffee before it goes cold or risk becoming a ghost bound to the chair forever.
Four visitors take the seat this time. Azami Kishimoto, who ran away from home in 1999 at fourteen and has never managed to call her mother since, goes back hoping to understand her. A man returns year after year, still waiting on a reply from a girlfriend who never wrote back. A woman uses the chair to look forward rather than back, wanting a glimpse of her own future — and what she sees ends up quietly threading through the other three stories. And a student travels back for one more conversation with the father he lost.
Themes I Noticed
Reconciliation, Long Overdue
- Azami's inability to make a single phone call across two decades
- Discovering that a mother's love was there all along, just unrecognisable in its shape
- How running away and staying away are two different decisions
Waiting Without an Answer
- The specific ache of loving someone who went silent
- Choosing to keep showing up at the café year after year regardless
- What it costs to finally let go of a question that will never be answered
Looking Forward Instead of Back
- The series' first real structural departure — a glimpse of the future rather than the past
- How foresight turns out to be as unsettling as hindsight
- One woman's future quietly overlapping with everyone else's present
Grief and the Unfinished Conversation
- A son revisiting his father to say what illness or death cut short
- Grief that sits alongside ordinary life rather than replacing it
- What the time-travel rule — that nothing can be changed — forces a mourner to accept
What Reviewers Said
Reception has been more divided than earlier books in the series. It currently sits around 3.86/5 on Goodreads (from roughly 4,600 ratings), and some critics have argued the formula is wearing thin — one review bluntly suggested "it's time to retire this concept," calling parts of it recycled. Others disagree, and I lean toward them. Reviewer Maria Johnson put it well:
"Kawaguchi doesn't fix anything. He just makes you feel less alone." — Life She Loves
That's the throughline for me too. Readers who wanted the café's world expanded got more of Kazu and Nagare than before, though the added screen time for supporting character Fumiko split opinion — a few reviewers found her more grating than endearing.
Six books in, the premise is unmistakably familiar, and I understand the fatigue some readers feel. But the future-facing story is a genuinely new move for the series, and pairing it with Azami's twenty-year silence gives this installment more emotional range than I expected going in. It's not the strongest entry in the series, but it's not just a repeat of the first one either — and that's enough to keep me reading if a seventh book shows up.