Before the Coffee Gets Cold

paperback, 208 pages

Published Sept. 19, 2019 by Picador.

ISBN:
978-1-5290-2958-1
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4 stars (46 reviews)

[Fiction / Fantasy / Contemporary] What would you change if you could go back in time?

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.

7 editions

Review of 'Before the Coffee Gets Cold' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Very delicate book, and as I was commenting with a friend it probably loses something in the translation. I wouldn't say it's a masterpiece and being a bestseller I was expecting something more from it, but it is a nice read. It explores joys and sorrows of human life through the lens of a café in Tokyo, interestingly named after a Neapolitan traditional song (!) which has the magic ability to let people travel in time.

Review of 'Before the Coffee Gets Cold' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

This wasn't for me. Lots of repetition, and each short story seemed designed to tug at your heart strings, but was too predictable to do so. Extremely boring messaging, with lots of female characters sacrificing themselves. I wanted them to explore the rules and the woman in the dress, but they never did. Very on the surface. Not a single cat (as pictured on the cover).

Review of 'Before the Coffee Gets Cold' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Time travel short stories based in a run down cafe in Tokyo. The stories cross path with each other naturally and the narrative flows in an interesting way. Although there are very few characters, it is complicated to grasp what’s the relationship is between them until the very last story of the book, so the reader kind of feels like time traveling too.
I think there’s an interesting concept in all the rules around the time travel process that make you reflect in whether you would do it or not. I don’t think I would.

Review of 'Before the Coffee Gets Cold' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I read this as an audiobook which was probably a mistake. I think I struggled to keep the names straight partly because they were Japanese and less familiar but also because there were a lot of K names. If I had read this in physical form I could’ve easily backtracked to remember who was who. But ultimately it didn’t matter too much - I just needed to focus on the person who wanted to sit in the time travel chair.

The writing was also a bit too simplistic for me - not sure if that’s the style of the author or the translation or some combo. Many times there were details included that felt like filler because it wasn’t like it was written poetically or something. Other times people said/did things that felt artificially dumb and repetitive.

The stories are pretty sentimental but there was enough there to keep me …

Review of 'Before the Coffee Gets Cold' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Imagine there's a café in your neighborhood. A small, basement café barely large enough to hold a few booths, a few tables, and a counter. This café, though, has a bit of a poorly-kept secret, in that if you sit at one of the seats in the café, you can travel back in time. You can't leave the seat, you can't change the past, and you have to drink the coffee put in front of you before it gets cold, but you can travel back in time. What would you change? Obviously you'd be limited to people in the café, or people who have visited the café, but things can still be said, people you've visited with can be revisited, and, essentially, closure could be had.

This short book consists of four short stories set inside this café involving visitors and staff members who each discover a need to revisit …

Review of 'Before the Coffee Gets Cold' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

The 4.3 stars from 1,400 reviews on Amazon had me expecting this to be a great book. It's not. The characters have little depth, as do the chapters, which are more like short stories. (This is more of an anthology of four interconnected stories than a novel.) One of the stories is good, two are okay, and one is just bad.

Sometimes a book with poor storytelling can be saved by brilliant writing. This is not one of those books. It's possible that some of the author's literary prowess was lost in translation, but there's no way a translator could present something so poorly written and still find work. Kawaguchi seems to be on a mission to break every rule about how to write well.

I'm stunned (not really) this got published and has received such praise. Fortunately it's a quick read that you can probably finish before the coffee …

Review of 'Before the Coffee Gets Cold' on 'Storygraph'

3 stars

I'm not going to comment on the writing because this was a translation.
This was definitely not something that I usually read but I enjoyed it. Being magical realism I hadn't expected obviously that we'd delve deeper into the whole time travel aspect. The characters were incorporated well into the story. I liked how everyone was involved. I liked all of the stories except for Fumiko & Goro's only because of the stereotypical portrayal of the characters. This was nothing too extraordinary, though. 

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