It took many rewrites as he had to revise the description of character movement, extend scenes, and pace the story differently. One of the editors at Sunmark became interested in the play and convinced Kawaguchi to convert it into a novel. “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” that was formerly a critically acclaimed play had to be adapted to a different writing style to become the best-selling novel. Similar to many Japanese authors such as Yukiko Motoya and Toshiki Okada, Toshikazu Kawaguchi started his career as a playwright before he became an author. “Das Magische Café from Droemer Knaur” the German version of the novel has been highly successful as had been the Chinese edition in Taiwan. Kawaguchi has sold the rights to the novel in more than nine jurisdictions including Turkey, China, Hungary, Germany, and the Czech Republic. The novel has sold more than 800,000 copies in his native Japan and has also been adapted into a movie. As a playwright, he wrote several critically acclaimed titles that include “Family Time,” “Sunset Song,” and “Couple.” He adapted his bestselling novel “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” from the play “1110 Productions” that was the winner of the grand prize at the 10th Suginami Drama Festival. He was formerly the director, producer, and writer for “Sonic Snail,” a small theatrical group. Ĭontinue the beautiful storytelling with Tales from the Cafe and Before Your Memory Fades.Toshikazu Kawaguchi is a Japanese literary fiction author born in 1971 in Osaka, Japan. In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the cafe’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by Alzheimer's, see their sister one last time, and meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.īut the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the cafe, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s moving Before the Coffee Gets Cold, translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot, explores the age-old question: what would you do if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?

Toshikazu kawaguchi books