Review by MELANIE DUGAN
3.75. A charming novel, but the most awkward translation I've ever read, and I've read a fair bit of Japanese literature in translation.
Availability Label | Location | Shelfmark | Availability | Reservations |
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Isabel Turner Branch | Fiction Kawag | On loan until: 26/Apr/24 |
12 | |
Isabel Turner Branch | Fiction Kawag | On loan until: 09/May/24 |
12 | |
Pittsburgh Branch | Fiction Kawag | On loan until: 14/May/24 |
13 | |
Storrington Branch | Fiction Kawag | On loan until: 11/May/24 |
13 |
Tell us what you thought about Before the coffee gets cold
3.75. A charming novel, but the most awkward translation I've ever read, and I've read a fair bit of Japanese literature in translation.
Title Statement | Before the coffee gets cold: a novel / Toshikazu Kawaguchi ; translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot. |
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Author | Kawaguchi, Toshikazu, 1971- |
Additional Contributors | Trousselot, Geoffrey |
Kawaguchi, Toshikazu,1971- | |
Publication | Toronto, Ontario: Hanover Square Press,2020. |
Extent of Item | 272 pages ; |
ISBN | 9781335430991 (hardcover) |
Other Number | pr05717003 |
General Notes | Originally published in Japan as Coffee ga samenai uchini by Sunmark Publishing Inc., Tokyo, Japan in 2015. |
Summary | In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café's time-travelling offer, in order to confront the lover who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has begun to fade, see their sister one last time, and meet the daughter they never got the chance to know. But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold ... Toshikazu Kawaguchi's beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time? |
Subjects & Genres | |
By Topic | Coffeehouses--Fiction--Japan--Tokyo |
Interpersonal relations--Fiction | |
Time travel--Fiction | |
By Genre | Magic realist fiction |
Time-travel fiction |