WHAT WOULD YOU choose to do if you were able to revisit a moment in your life, with any of your beloveds, people either living or dead? While you’re with them, you’ve got just the amount of time it takes for a cup of coffee to get cold and you can’t alter the path of providence in what you say to them. This is the concept underpinning Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s 2024 novel, Before we forget kindness, published by Picador, an imprint of Pan MacMillan.

It’s a curious book, where the quality of line work in the descriptive passages is so achingly beautiful and so fascinatingly spare, it makes you feel like you are reading Japanese — from which it has ably been translated into English. The metaphors are simple and rich. There is a sense of colour that is memorable and strong. The characters are soundly developed.

However, as you amble through the work’s chapters, you find yourself occasionally checking the cover of the book. Billed as being by the “bestselling author of Before the Coffee Gets Cold”, this book develops exact that theme. And the time limit is of course, the coffee. This PR punt on the cover makes the current book, if you’re not familiar with Kawaguchi’s work, feel like a bit of an easy leap from a great success and diminishes this book’s potency as a discrete project from before you’ve opened its cover.

Having said that, the work is a compelling read that keeps you intrigued as it holds on to your own personal what ifs, and what would I say or do under the circumstances, but as you read, the rules of the game keep changing. And there are contradictions. Are you allowed to drink that coffee? You can only meet the person in the coffee shop in question, or can you?

These inconsistencies lend a bit of confusion to the basic lines of the story which offer glosses on situations lost and won, missed opportunities to be kind, and so on. In order for the charm to work, you have to wait for a ghost who sits in a particular chair, to go to the toilet. A whimsical and curious idea which is split open like a skein of wool as the work reaches completion. It’s a satisfying and light read, but one in which you cannot avert the feeling that you’re being cheated into reading the stories that didn’t make it into Kawaguchi’s ‘global bestseller’.

• Before we forget kindness is written by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated from the Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot and published by Picador, an imprint of Pan MacMillan (2024).