Before the Coffee Gets Cold

A Novel

De: Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Narrado por: Arina Ii

Over One Million Copies Sold

Now an International Best Seller

If you could go back, who would you want to meet?

In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than 100 years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee - the chance to travel back in time.

Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn’t so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold.

Heartwarming, wistful, mysterious, and delightfully quirky, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s internationally best-selling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time?

©2020 Toshikazu Kawaguchi (P)2020 Harlequin Audio

An Enjoyable Cup of Coffee Awaits

This was very good. I wasn’t sure what to expect but found myself captivated by the character’s stories and the setting. This also shows that our assumptions or judgments of people and situations can be wildly off mark. Very thought provoking. The narration seemed a bit slower than what I am used to and while one can speed things up, I ended up feeling that it helped to draw me into the story more. Well done. Don’t expect a fast pace sci-fi time travel story. This is one you will want to take your time to enjoy and have a cup of coffee with.

Unnecessarily Frustrating

This collection of stories left me unsatisfied. It didn't live up to its potential. I liked the characters, and the premise was promising, but it needed to be fleshed out more. I have unanswered questions, such as (spoiler alert)...

Why couldn't they have refilled the cup? ...or used a different one that would cool more slowly? ...or covered it?

Why was it necessary to drink it at all, if leaving the seat would return you to the present just as well? I kept waiting for someone to outsmart the system.

Why didn't they always use the thermometer? What temperature was the official boundary for "cool?"

Why didn't anyone plan better before time-traveling?

What was the deal with the ghost lady? And the 3 clocks? And the fact that it was always climate-controlled without the need for an a/c unit?

If it's a cheap ploy to get me to read the sequel, I feel manipulated.

Quaint and Charming, If a Bit Strange

TL;DR: There is no cat prominently featured in this book despite one being on the cover, but it's still a charming read.

I had been curious about this title for a while and when the audiobooks went on sale on Audible, I went for it. I figured that my love for the writings of Haruki Murakami would make it easier to appreciate this title.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold is more of an anthology of stories set in this particular cafe. They are told in an order that is roughly chronological with many characters featured in earlier stories coming back in later chapters.

What makes this cafe a worthy place to set all these stories is the fact that people are able to travel back to the past at this cafe. There are many limitations to this time travel including only being able to meet people who had ever been at the cafe, not being able to get up from a particular seat during this visit, and the titular constraint where one can only stay in the past for as long as the coffee hasn't gone cold. It's a little funny (and sometimes annoying) how the narrator repeatedly stresses how annoying all these rules are, but it does provide a very specific framework for the type of stories told.

On the whole, the stories are generally interesting but do take a bit of time to set up. There's a LOT of back story we end up covering for each new character whose time travel adventure we end up following with a number of details repeated across the tales. I haven't looked into it, but I can see the shape of things such that each story can stand on its own given the repetition of things like the rules and the fact that the cafe has multiple clocks that don't show the same time.

The narrator selected for this book was also okay but not necessarily great. I know it's partly my unfamiliarity with Japanese names, but the narration also didn't help in terms of better differentiating the characters, which made it a little harder to keep track of everyone. And as these stories are set in a cafe, there are a fair number of characters that get pulled into each story.

Disappointed

The ending is the only reason this isn't 1 star. The story line had potential, but I was gravely disappointed with the rest of the book.

Beautiful Story

The arc of this story is beautifully developed with masterful skill and performed/read with the simple straightforward manner that makes it come alive for the listener. Great listen!

Such Beautiful Stories

The stories are so sweet and touching it’s hard not to say it’s a five star just due to the topics and tears shed lol What I will say is my friends physically read the book, and didn’t have the same experience I had. This is definitely the type of story that needs to be told to you rather then read to yourself in your head if that makes sense? But i loved it. 5/5

Do you want to see?

Enjoyable listen. Healthy way of looking at traveling in time to see and have a glimpse at an experience from your own secondary perspective.

Wonderful! Beautiful and heart warming story!

I listened to this book while commuting. I love how the premise of the book is sort of bizarre and I got so drawn into the story. The café is a curious place and the characters are an unusual bunch. The story was woven around all these characters so beautifully. The bonds formed between the characters and how their experiences in the café changed them in unexpected ways is truly heart warming.

But I have to ask...

Who is that woman with the novel? I would love to know more than what was written but I guess we’ll never know?

An Interior and Relational Drama

I thought the story well done; very simply told. I did wish for greater depth and liveliness of plot, but what is here is very good. The confinement of the story to the cafe mostly worked, but I found myself chafing a bit at the constraints and hoping that the rules would change or that there would be some clever breaking of the rules. The worst part was the difference between the audio and the published novel. Some of it may have been the correction of errors (or simply errors in the audio), but some of it also clearly related to matters of translation and the differences between American and British English.

EMOTIONALLY SATISFYING!

Enjoyed this book immensely. Gently paced, wonderful, relatable characters and a riveting story in each chapter. I'm going to miss these folks but I will never forget them.