Before the Coffee Gets Cold Book 5: Before We Forget Kindness by Toshikazu Kawaguchi - Fiction - Paperback

About it

Details. Condition: New. Format: Paperback. ISBN: 9781035046287. Publisher: Picador (Pan Macmillan). Age Range: Adult (16+). Overview. Before We Forget Kindness is the fifth instalment in Toshikazu Kawaguchi's phenomenon Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot. This new paperback edition returns to the same quiet Tokyo basement café where a single cup of coffee can carry a visitor back through time. Four new guests arrive carrying private regrets and fragile hopes, each hoping that revisiting a single moment might change how they face the present. Gentle, wise and deeply moving, it's a perfect next read for fans of the series or anyone drawn to hopeful, character-led Japanese fiction.. About the Book. Kawaguchi's signature premise returns in full force: enter the café, sit in the one particular seat, and you may travel back in time – but only until the coffee grows cold, and only if you return before it does. In Before We Forget Kindness, four visitors take up the invitation: a father who could not bring himself to allow his daughter to marry, a woman who never managed to give Valentine's Day chocolates to the person she loved, a boy longing to show his parents, now divorced, that he can still smile, and a wife cradling a child who has not yet been named. Each story is small in scale but enormous in feeling, built from ordinary regrets rather than dramatic tragedy. Kawaguchi, who began the series as a stage play, writes with the patient, theatrical rhythm of someone used to watching people in a single room over a single evening. The translation preserves the softness and restraint of the original Japanese, letting silences and small gestures carry as much weight as dialogue. Readers who have followed the café through earlier volumes will recognise familiar staff and rituals, while newcomers can enjoy this as a self-contained, gently magical story of regret, forgiveness and the quiet courage required to reconnect with the p