Why is Before the Coffee gets Cold so popular? - Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Four touching stories that take place in the same magic café. This book became popular because it was heartwarming, innovative and short. Before the Coffee Gets Cold tells a story of a café where you can travel through time if you follow their rules, one being that you must return before the coffee gets cold.

This story is essentially a fun way to show 4 different types of relationships with a fun twist being the coffee and the magic. It is short, around 210 pages and it has straightforward language which ends up making it easy to read in just a day.

These stories are all connected through the café and even the characters that are in that café, which I have always appreciated a lot. I love that you can come back to the same storyline but each chapter you get a different glimpse into the magic and their background stories.

Kawaguchi really does a good job with this book and its characters as you slowly fall in love with every single one of them. They are all lovely and really convincing, each having a unique personality and background.

However, this book cut short in one thing, the action or rather, the drama. I wish I could have gotten an extra few pages in each story for the story to be explored further. This eventually ended up being what made this book almost boring. I still enjoyed the stories and the characters but I felt like there was something missing. I wish that Kawaguchi could have added a 100 pages just to make these stories longer and more interesting. I am not saying that the stories by themselves were not touching but, they were lacking some more space to explore.

I do have to say that my favourite of all the stories was the second one. It made me sob hard as it was so beautifully written and full of emotion. I wish the rest of the stories could have been closer to this one.

This book is another collection to my Japanese shelf that I have enjoyed. However, I will not be reading the second part to the story any time soon as I think there are many other Japanese authors that I have enjoyed better.