The tales start in a Café in Tokyo called Funiculi Funicula. Before We Say Goodbye is the fourth book in the Before the Coffee Gets Cold quartet. It is advisable to read the novels in sequence because the characters develop as the story of the windowless basement café proceeds. There is a diagram showing the main characters but it is incomplete and the relationship between Nagare and Kazu took me a while to work out. The woman in white remains a mysterious character for many pages. However, these slight difficulties did not detract from my pleasure in reading something that is so different from any Western novel. Each book is very short, only 150 to 200 pages and each one is written to the same exact formula. A person loses a loved one and desperately wishes they had done or said something before the tragedy happened. Often it has to do with not having expressed some emotion or having misunderstood a situation. It turns out that if one sits in a particular chair in the café one can go back in time and although one cannot change the present one can meet up with the deceased and have one last conversation. But there are rules. One must drink up before the coffee gets cold, otherwise one can never return to the present. There is a good deal of repetition. Details such as the lack of windows, the three clocks that each tell a different time, the ceiling fan, the smell of the coffee and the lack of music make up a sort of chorus that is almost hypnotic as is the ritual of pouring out the coffee that allows a person sitting in that particular chair go back to the past, or it turns out, go forwards into the future. There is extensive soul searching as each character decides why they want to do whatever it is that may make the dead rest more easily and indeed allow the living to get on with a happy life. There is one important message that is debated at length in each book: each individual learns that to honour the dead we must live happy and fulfilling lives. However difficult that might seem. They would not want us to be miserable. Strongly recommended.