Before the Coffee Gets Cold
If you could go back in time, 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 one hundred 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 bestselling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time?
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Before the Coffee Gets Cold
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In a small Tokyo basement cafe, sitting in one specific seat will let you visit the past, as long as you finish your coffee before it gets cold. Four customers try, knowing they cannot change a thing.
Yes. Toshikazu Kawaguchi has written several Before the Coffee Gets Cold novels: Tales from the Cafe, Before Your Memory Fades, Before We Say Goodbye, and Before We Forget Kindness. Each follows the same Tokyo cafe and its time-travel rules.
Yes. Toshikazu Kawaguchi adapted Before the Coffee Gets Cold from his own stage play before turning it into a novel. The book retains its play-like structure of self-contained scenes.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold was written by 川口俊和, published in 2019 by Knaur.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold is 240 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Before the Coffee Gets Cold takes most readers 4 to 5 hours to finish.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.