The coffee-making process is described with considerable sensory detail. If Benjamin Obler updated his 2009 list of the ‘top ten fictional coffee scenes’ for the Guardian then Before the Coffee Gets Cold would easily make the cut. Despite a tantalizing premise the execution of time travel with ever added on new rules is sloppy. And the underlying morale of the four stories is basically highly conservative in my opinion.

Last and most important. Drink the coffee before it gets cold or you'll be the ghost to occupy the chair. 🙂 But then...a severe damper arrives. My parade is rained on. Stormy weather comin' in. Insert other precipitation metaphors. The first story feels so old fashioned, with a girl crying over being left by a guy and this just continues. I mean the geek boyfriend of a stunningly beautiful girl gets a job in the US (with a game studio of all things) and then his career is in her mind suddenly more accomplished than hers? She works in medical engineering for a listed firm; she is a manager and can supposedly speak 6 languages, but can’t even normally articulate her needs and opinion to him apparently? And then she realizes that happiness lies on waiting for her non-communicative boyfriend to return. The end. Kawaguchi offers a surface level exploration of the emotional lives of his time travellers. However, the novel delves deeper into the ceremony of coffee making. The cafe has a rich history as it first opened its doors in the late 19th century. Nagare uses a variety of coffee brewing methods including the ‘siphon method’ and the ‘hand-drip style’. everything" as in each woman Kawaguchi wrote only has one purpose in their life. should've done my research and seen that this book was written by a man.Mechanically, from a storytelling and writing point of view, Before the Coffee Gets Cold needs a complete overhaul. The characters - Kei, Kazu, Nagare - all seemed like the same person and were basically interchangeable because their personalities were that indistinct and irrelevant. The Alzheimer’s storyline felt especially pointless - the wife wants to talk to her husband about the letter he wrote, that was handed to her in the present, that she refused to read, but she wants him to tell her about it in the past? Just read it in the present! And the future storyline - what, she just “knows” that she’s going to die in childbirth? Gimme a break. Who wouldn’t want to time travel? Well, you probably wouldn’t if you had to follow these very precise, arbitrary and convoluted rules - yes, even more so than the usual! So the characters in this story can time travel but only to the relatively recent past and they have to sit in a specific seat at a specific table - which they can’t leave once they time travel, which means they can’t leave the cafe - and only for the duration it takes for a coffee to cool, after which you have to drink it down or else risk turning into a ghost forever burdened to haunt the cafe. Also nothing you do in the past can alter the present/future. Yay, so much whimsical fun… With its atmospheric setting and imagery, simple prose and elements of magical realism, Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi is an engaging and thought-provoking read. Though the occasional dispassionate tone and the repetitiveness in the text did bother me slightly, overall I did enjoy the read and look forward to reading the next installment in this series.

Apparently, this book was written as a play first, which could explain why so much of it feels so over-explained and bluntly delivered. Much of what I found annoying could fill a role as stage directions in a performance piece, but it really jars in a novel. The fact that there time travellers must abide by a number of rules gets mentioned maybe ten times in the first section of the book, and the rules themselves get repeated so often that they become mantra-like. A woman entered the cafe alone. She was wearing a beige cardigan over a pale aqua shirt-dress and crimson trainers, and a white canvas bag.On the other hand I was close to crying three times while reading which had nothing to do with reading the rules for time travel repeatedly so we could say it was a very good novel in succeeding to hit the sentimental, emotional, or just plain mawkish spot. More annoyingly, Toshikazu Kawaguchi explains everything the characters feel, making the stories overly simple and sentimental. Somewhere the following passes someone’s mind: But none of those feelings could be formed into words. In the second story a women just naturally sees herself as a nurse for her husband and is treated quite unappreciatively by him. This story did have heart and I am not going say much negative about this one. Now, those two complaints aside... honestly, I kind of liked it. This is by no means a great novel, but I found the time travel rules fairly amusing (and frustrating, but it kind of delighted me in that regard as well). Also, I liked the character of Kazu. As a former barista I delighted in her character. A customer comes in and pisses off a ghost and gets herself cursed? Well, offer the ghost some coffee. The ghost is just an annoyance and the customer should have been focusing on the coffee and leaving the ghost alone anyway (This really is how 90% of baristas who work the night crew would act, I assure you. You did something stupid, we would note it for future stories and possibly even post a snarky sign telling customers not to do the stupid thing again). One issue as with the first book is that the author seems to think the readers have short term memory and tends to remind us time and again about the rules of the cafe.

Perhaps if I read the collection which preceded this, 'Before the Coffee Gets Cold', I would have appreciated or understood more about this book.

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Meet more wonderful characters in the next captivating novel in the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, Before We Say Goodbye, releasing November 14, 2023! I hate (HATE!!!!) or "personally do not like books" where women die because of a pregnancy. Let alone for a pregnancy. Especially on purpose. Especially in books written by men. It’s just not my cup of tea. second story: a woman devoting her life to care for her husband who has dementia. i don't have a problem with this one by itself, but after reading the other stories, there is a theme here. In true Japanese fashion, the magic realism of the Tokyo cafe is reigned in by a strict set of protocols for returning to the past — as the coffee is poured the guests leave in a “shimmering steam”; they must not leave their allocated seat inside the cafe and can only meet those they have previously seen there, they must also return to the present before the coffee gets cold otherwise they become trapped as a ghost in the cafe. Kawaguchi wanted to impart the importance for all of us to face reality hence the heart-wrenching rule that no matter what happens or how one tries to change the past, it will not alter the present. This time we follow a man wanting to visit an old friend who died in a car crash 22 years ago, a detective wanting to give his wife the birthday gift he was never able to give, a son wanting to see his departed mother one last time and a dying man wanting to see the girl he could never marry. Connecting them all are the staff of the cafe, a small family unit in themselves.