Before the Coffee Gets Cold
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3.8 • 227 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
One of the most popular Booktok books on Tiktok in 2022
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.
In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café's time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.
But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold ...
Toshikazu Kawaguchi's beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Japanese playwright Kawaguchi's evocative English-language debut is set in a tiny Tokyo caf where time travel is possible. In four connected tales, lovers and family members take turns sitting in the chair that allows a person to travel back in time for only as long as it takes a single cup of coffee to cool. In "Husband and Wife," a nurse goes back in time to visit her husband before his Alzheimer's erased her from his memory; in "The Sisters," a woman visits her younger sister, who died in an accident while trying to visit her, to apologize for not seeing her. Kawaguchi's characters embark on lo-fi, emotional journeys unburdened by the technicalities often found in time travel fiction notably, they are unable to change the present. The characters learn, though, that even though people don't return to a changed present, they return "with a changed heart." Kawaguchi's tender look at the beauty of passing things, adapted from one of his plays, makes for an affecting, deeply immersive journey into the desire to hold onto the past. This wondrous tale will move readers.
Customer Reviews
Review to self
My, that was good.
It was composed of short stories and it was simply realistic, it wasn’t anything of the miracle where good people get good things; this books show the concept of ‘moving on’ and being able to adapt/accept the situation due to the rule of ‘not being able to change the present.’ And like a typical trope of time traveling, the story also states that it was ever best to be honest and truthful within a moment. From lighthearted story of two lovers to three last stories to be bittersweeet. I favorite tale in the book was the one between the nurse and her husband.
The reason it doesn’t have a 5 star was because the writings of characters didn’t exactly make me empathize for the characters. Yes I did cry in some part but I didn’t feel a genuine connection between them. Kazu especially, even though I get to know her a little bit from what people within the story sees of her, I just didn’t feel like she was a ‘person.’ She was described as distant but it was distant to the readers, too, which is an amazing manipulation of techniques that the author was able to do. But I just wish I could at least see more from her, even towards the end, it was just empty…
And is there like an option to private reviews?😭
Simple fiction
The first chapter had some glaring flaws, buy the narration kept it interesting.
What moment in the past do you want to visit or is there a moment in the future you hope to see, before the coffee gets cold?
Before the coffee get cold
I found the book okay, but chopped and changed characters a lot I would certainly recommend to others as they may enjoy this book