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Before the Coffee Gets Cold - January 2026 Book Club Reading

Falselogic

Falselogic

Lapsed Threadcromancer
(they/them)
Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Kohi ga Samenai Uchi ni) is a 2015 novel by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. It tells the story of a café in Tokyo that allows its customers to travel back in time, as long as they return before their coffee gets cold. The story originally began as a play in 2010, before being adapted into a novel in 2015. It it is the first book in an continuing series, the sixth book was published in 2024.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi is a Japanese author, screenwriter, and director born in Osaka, Japan. He has received the Grand Prize of the Suginami Theatre Festival for his stage version of Before the Coffee Gets Cold as well as having been nominated for the Bookseller's Award for the novel.
 
Just put my hold in! Library's closed for Xmas but they've got five copies available, so I'm hoping to be able to jump right in once January rolls around.
 
This was my pick, I was absolutely floored by this book when it came out, and several friends and I have gushed about it. On a recent trip to Japan a friend asked for pictures of what this cafe might be like just so she could better imagine it.

I've read all the others in the series (I think there's one that isn't in English yet so haven't read that yet but hopefully soon) and loved them too, but it's been a while since I've revisited the first one. The writing in the whole series could be described as simple and dry, but it's powerful.
 
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I'm curious how you all feel about it: my wife absolutely hated it, and for a couple weeks after a running joke was repeating several repetitive rules for things.
 
lincolnic said:
Just put my hold in! Library's closed for Xmas but they've got five copies available, so I'm hoping to be able to jump right in once January rolls around.
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My hold has come in! I'll finish up my current book, then get on it.
 
I'm amazed that you all have libraries that are open on New Year's Day. (My hold is also in, will probably get to the library over the weekend.)
 
My library wasn't open on New Year's itself. They sent the notification on the 31st.
 
I just finished the first chapter and the café definitely has a cozy vibe to it.

One thing I love about good time travel stories is that they always carry an air of melancholy about them, and this is no exception. Although at least in this case the protagonist seems to have found a happy ending. Assuming this is the last we see of her anyway.
 
Last time we were in Japan I picked up a Japanese copy of this. It's way, way above my Japanese level (I'm about an 11 on Natively and it's a 28) so it was more of a souvenir of a book I love than something to read. But I noticed there's an Intermediate level Wani Kani book club for this so maybe I'll poke around and see if they have any interesting translation notes.
Alex said:
One thing I love about good time travel stories is that they always carry an air of melancholy about them, and this is no exception.
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Oh man, buckle up, there's a lot of melancholy in this. I'll say more once it's later in the month.

I should note that there was a Japanese movie, it's... fine. They change and add a couple things but it feels more like a television drama level of production/acting than a movie. The trailer spoils what the situation is for every guest so I don't recommend watching it until you're done (it's much more specific than the chapter names), but here's a link. To @Nodal 's point the movie does continue to drive home the rules and repetition.

Personally I like the repetition as a narrative/writing structure choice, I think it stresses that many customers visited the cafe but didn't find it worth trying to do this, and there's something poetic and magical about the phrases. It was also originally intended to be a play, so I wonder if that's some carryover, some grounding of key phrases to build a scene around.
 
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I haven't participated in one of these for a while. VV's caution about talking about the latter parts of the book makes this semi-neophyte ask: what's the protocol about spoilers? Do we spoiler tag them, wait until a certain point in the month to talk about the whole book freely, or...?
 
Rosewood said:
I haven't participated in one of these for a while. VV's caution about talking about the latter parts of the book makes this semi-neophyte ask: what's the protocol about spoilers? Do we spoiler tag them, wait until a certain point in the month to talk about the whole book freely, or...?
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The general practice has been to spoiler tag the first two to three weeks of the month and then allow for more open discussion that last week or so.

EDIT: Oh and thanks for joining us! Happy to have you here!
 
This is a very light read. I've only got one more chapter before it's over.
 
I am just reading through the Wani Kani book club notes because this was way too hard for me in Japanese, but there are a lot of notes about repetition, I think this breakdown of the writing of a section in Chapter 1 is interesting:

Hirai says, “In other words, he chose his job (over you).”, and about her comment, the text notes: 「平井は二美子の顔も見ずにサラリと核心をついた。」; Roughly: Hirai cut straight to the heart of the matter without even looking at Fumiko.

Then a few lines later, we get Kazu’s line, “In other words, you didn’t really want him to go to America.” , and the text further notes: 「数も数で核心をついた返事をした」; roughly: Kazu also cut to the heart of the matter in her own way with her reply.

Notice how the author used the same phrase (核心をつく) in each line. In other words, Kazu and Hirai were both direct in pointing out what they were reading between the lines in Fumiko’s story, but where Hirai was pretty rude in her frankness, Kazu by contrast was frank in her own way, which was nowhere near as abrasive. That’s what I get out of the 数は数で
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These lines in English (starting on page 21 in my copy) are

"America," Fumiko said, puffing out her cheeks.
"So your boyfriend chose work, then?" Hirai had a gift for getting to the heart of the matter.

(about a page later)

"You understood, right?" she said, looking for support from Kazu.
Kazu feigned a moment's contemplation. "Basically you're saying you didn't want him to go to America, right?"
Kazu was also one to get straight to the point.
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Interesting, gets to the same point but cool to know that in Japanese it's the exact same word for both responses.
 
Alex said:
This is a very light read. I've only got one more chapter before it's over.
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I've had a similar impression, that it's the adult version of a light novel (which I more associate with young adult/YA).
 
I'm about halfway through. I was a bit wary during the first episode as it seemed to be a bit too tedious in teasing out the rules and mechanics of time travel; Fumiko takes quite a while to get to the "obvious" question of (and answer to) why should she go back, given the restraints. Once that's taken care of, things start rolling much more smoothly and the book gets to focus on the characters. I know, this is probably more of a "me" problem than a fault in the book, but decades of reading science fiction and fantasy have conditioned me to think in the way of "here's a given weird thing that exists in this fictional world, how can the characters take advantage of it?"
 
I figured out what the point of the first story was a lways before Fumiko did, but that at least in part was due to my enjoying a certain subgenre that I won't get into just yet.

I agree that the start was slow. I get that a character who'd never been in this kind of situation on an ordinary earth would disbelieve what they were hearing, but this reader thought that the rules were explained to her a couple too many times.
 
I read this a couple years ago so I still remember quite a few of the details, but I was a little surprised to check the table of contents and see that there were only four stories or chapters or whatever you want to call them. So while I was reading the first story unencumbered by questions of how the time travel plot would pan out, which meant that I was able to notice that
almost all of the time travelers make an appearance in the very first story,
which is an interesting decision given the episodic structure of the book. And I do enjoy that Fumiko gets her resolution through her extremely literal interpretation of the rules as they're presented to her.

I do think it's kind of wild that
the cafe has a ghost who can curse people and has apparently immigrated into the story from an entirely different genre. Or, given what we're told about where the ghost comes from, maybe this was originally a haunted cafe from a horror story whose management repurposed it into a business more suitable for the Cozy Depression genre or whatever this is properly called.
 
Finished this on my way home today. I'm sorry to say that it didn't really do that much for me, mostly because of the writing style. This is very much a book that ignores the "show, don't tell" rule. Everything is spelled out for the reader very clearly and plainly, down to a character's inner thoughts and motivations. It really felt to me like the author adapted their stage play as literally as possible -- you could basically use this novel as the script for a stage show, down to the costume-like descriptions of what each character is wearing when they enter a scene.

I will agree with Alex that the final chapter had the most emotional impact. It loses some of the stiffness that the rest of the book has and its direct language comes across as impactful rather than clunky. Of the four, it was far and away my favorite.

I wish they would've told the ghost's story, though.

In any case, I wouldn't have heard of this book or picked it up on my own, so thanks @Violentvixen for expanding my horizons!
 
Finished it too. It was a breezy read, and despite my previous niggles, it was not too abrasive in its time travel mechanics exposition after the start. Like others have mentioned, the book almost feels like it was intended for a slightly different medium - a light novel, a stage play, or a graphic novel. This is not necessarily a complaint, but it did add to the feeling of breeziness; like linc said, almost every thought is spelled out so there's not much left for the imagination of the reader. And despite all that, the scenes are genuinely emotional, each of them in their own way. I might try out a sequel (or more) later.
 
Olli said:
the book almost feels like it was intended for a slightly different medium
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I mean, it was a stage play first. The author is a playwright who adapted it as his first novel. I just wish he'd treated it more like one.
 
lincolnic said:
I mean, it was a stage play first. The author is a playwright who adapted it as his first novel. I just wish he'd treated it more like one.
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Right, I missed that part by not reading the original post. Well it makes perfect sense!
 
That last chapter was her least favorite part.
the mom is told that she will die if she has kids and chooses to do so anyway, basically choosing to abandon their future child. The books frames it as a noble, heroic choice but it's actually just kind of incredibly selfish.
 
I wonder how much of the stiffness is related to the translation from Japanese to English? The dryness is very similar to another translated novel I read, the Tokyo Zodiac Murders.

I'll confess to having a degree of "name blindness" when it comes to Japanese names, by which I mean that I have a hard time remembering them based off their name alone. Tokyo Zodiac Murders has characters named Ayako, Masako, Yoshio, Tomoko, Tamio, Tokiko, Reiko, and Yukiko and I thought the book was messing with me.
 
I finished the first chapter with Fumiko. Agree with the breeziness. I have appreciated the author's ability to create a sense of space and feeling to the cafe without going into long descriptions. But in this first section. Bit by bit as they tell the story of Fumiko and explain the rules of time travel little descriptor by descriptor the cafe gets built out. I liked that.
 
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