Before the Coffee Gets Cold

A Novel

By: Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Narrated by: Arina Ii

Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

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

Fun concept hamstrung by poor writing.

A fun concept hamstrung by very poor writing and possibly a poor translation. It's very clear when author is writing about things they don't understand and didn't bother to fact check, this makes the characters and setting feel very hollow.

Simple and so entertaining

I found this to be such a joyful book to listen to. It was a beautifully written stories with decisions that were thoughtfully planned out. This book had every opportunity to be a tedious and annoying book, but it absolutely was not. It was well written and really put yourself in the character’s situation and wonder, what would I do? This book was such a pleasure to listen to.

really interesting unique take on time travel

This was a unique read. Time travel is a well used theme in stories and often times the stories take on a similar template and you kind of know the direction it will take. But this, this was different. This little coffee shop in Japan offered this serious opportunity to travel back in time for as long as the coffee stays warm.

The rules to the time travel opportunities were really different too. It drives home the question of "what would you do if you could go back to a time in your past" Why would you go and what would you hope to accomplish.

The characters were quirky as was the setting. You don't get much development outside of the coffee shop but the characters who frequent it bring the life to it.

Being American and not familiar with too many Japanese names I found it a bit hard to follow the names of the characters at times as some of them sounded similar and without seeing the name on paper to differentiate it from the next you really had to pay attention to the goings on of the characters to follow who was who.

It's a fresh and different take on a overused theme. I liked it.

Very thought provoking

I wasn't expecting to read what I read. I think I was expecting something more whimsical and science-laced. There was none if that here. However, this wasn't at all a bad read and I pushed through to the finish, despite its slow build-up.

crushing and beautiful

this book made me laugh and weep. it's beautiful and will stay with me for a long time

Amazing story

I loved this story. I am amazed how the story resonates within my own life.

Lost in translation

I did not love this book. It was just ok. I feel like many the heart of the book got lost in translation. It was a decent story line but would get confusing at times. It lacked the heart for me to keep reading the series.

Intriguing

Very interesting story and concept. Worth your time for sure. Will seek more stories from this author.

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.