Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Toshikazu Kawaguchi, 2015
Fantasy Contemporary fictionRomance
A Tokyo café where one chair sends you to another time — with a rule that makes every visit ache. Four people sit down.
Feels like wonder. About time and love.
A page from the book
Grief is easier to hide from strangers than from the people who love you.
Water flows from high places to low places. That is the nature of gravity. Emotions also seem to act according to gravity. When in the presence of someone with whom you have a bond, and to whom you have entrusted your feelings, it is hard to lie and get away with it. The truth just wants to come flowing out. This is especially the case when you are trying to hide your sadness or vulnerability. It is much easier to conceal sadness from a stranger, or from someone you don’t trust. Toshikazu Kawaguchi.Kawaguchi wrote the story as a play before it became a novel; his Tokyo theatre company, Caravan, still performs it on stage.
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Questions readers ask
- What is Before the Coffee Gets Cold like?
- Feels like wonder. About time and love.
- What should I read after Before the Coffee Gets Cold?
- If you liked Before the Coffee Gets Cold, try One True Loves (Taylor Jenkins Reid), This Is How You Lose the Time War (Amal El-Mohtar) and A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle).
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What it feels like to end something that is still warm.
Falling out of love with someone you still like feels exactly like lying in a warm bed and hearing the alarm clock. No matter how good you feel right now, you know it’s time to go.
One True Loves · Taylor Jenkins Reid
What do you bring someone who has all of time?
I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.
This Is How You Lose the Time War · Amal El-Mohtar
The moment a familiar body becomes something no myth has a name for.
The wild colors of her clothes became muted, whitened. The pudding-bag shape stretched, lengthened, merged. And suddenly before the children was a creature more beautiful than any Meg had even imagined, and the beauty lay in far more than the outward description. Outwardly Mrs. Whatsit was surely no longer a Mrs. Whatsit. She was a marble-white body with powerful flanks, something like a horse but at the same time completely unlike a horse, for from the magnificently modeled back sprang a nobly formed torso, arms, and a head resembling a man’s, but a man with a perfection of dignity and virtue, an exaltation of joy such as Meg had never before seen.
A Wrinkle in Time · Madeleine L'Engle
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