Before the Coffee Gets Cold
The cosy million-copy sensation from Japan
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3.8 • 19 Ratings
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- €6.99
Publisher Description
The cosy, heartwarming first book in the multi-million copy bestselling series.
What would you do if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time? Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold, translated from Japanese, explores this age-old question . . .
In a cosy back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe 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.
Prepare to meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the cafe’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 Alzheimer's
- see their sister one last time
- 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 cafe. And finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .
‘This book broke my heart, took the pieces, and put them back together in a messy and beautiful way. . . ' - well.read.woman on Instagram
Continue the beautifully moving storytelling with Tales from the Cafe, Before Your Memory Fades, Before We Say Goodbye and Before We Forget Kindness.
**Before I knew I loved you, the sixth book in the series, is available to pre-order now!**
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
Meh
I just didn’t really care for it, maybe short stories aren’t for me but I just found myself being like why do I care about this?
Now don’t get me wrong it does make you think about what you would do if given this opportunity with the same rules and reflect on why these people go back in time to begin with if nothing about their present will change, but it just wasn’t all that for me.
I found it a little hard to follow because there was basically no character development yet you were expected to deeply root for all these characters and just know who they are by their names.
I especially had issues with the last story as I feel it has borderline plot holes and I do not understand kei and Nagares relationship at all like does he even like her idk maybe it’s a cultural thing.
Spoiler!!!!!!
the whole situation with her going to the future to meet her daughter is literally a plot hole to me like how did the rest of the staff figure out the time mishap yet still booked a trip to Hokkaido and chose to go instead of seeing their best friend/ wife who has been dead for 15 years?? And miki being shy to talk to her dead mother at 15y/o when she knows she only had until the coffee gets cold to meet her is just like not realistic to me idk
Overall idk wouldn’t be my fav very mid I won’t be reading the rest of the series