Toshikazu Kawaguchi Books in Order

If you want the natural starting point: Before the Coffee Gets Cold → Tales from the Café → Before Your Memory Fades
If you want the full experience: Before the Coffee Gets Cold → Tales from the Café → Before Your Memory Fades → Before We Say Goodbye → Before We Forget Kindness → Before I Knew I Loved You
If you want the Hakodate sister café story: Before Your Memory Fades
If you want the newest run of books: Before We Say Goodbye → Before We Forget Kindness → Before I Knew I Loved You

Toshikazu Kawaguchi was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1971. Before most English-language readers knew his name, he was working in theater, producing, directing, and writing for the group Sonic Snail. That background still shows in his fiction. His books often feel built like plays, with a tight setting, a small cast, and conversations that carry the emotional weight.

He started as a playwright, not a novelist.

Among his stage works are COUPLE, Sunset Song, and Family Time. The real turning point came with Before the Coffee Gets Cold, first written as a play for 1110 Productions. It won the grand prize at the 10th Suginami Drama Festival, and an editor later urged him to rework the story into prose.

That shift gave him a much bigger room to work in, even though the story itself stayed inside one small cafe.

The novel version of Before the Coffee Gets Cold kept the clean, almost theatrical setup: a Tokyo cafe, a handful of strict rules, and people hoping for one more moment with someone they love. It went on to become the book that introduced Kawaguchi to readers around the world. The novel was nominated for the 2017 Japan Booksellers' Award, and it was adapted into a Japanese feature film in 2018.

Most readers begin there and then move through Tales from the Cafe, Before Your Memory Fades, and Before We Say Goodbye. What keeps them reading is not only the time-travel hook. It is the way Kawaguchi uses that hook to talk about regret, family ties, illness, grief, missed chances, and the relief that can come when someone finally says the thing they were too late to say the first time.

That focus is a big part of his appeal. Kawaguchi is less interested in complicated mechanics than in what the rules reveal about character. His travelers cannot simply erase pain or engineer a happier life. Instead they have to decide what one short visit is really worth. Is it enough to hear an answer, offer forgiveness, or leave a memory behind? Again and again, his fiction says yes.

His stories are usually small in scale, but not small in feeling. A basement cafe in Tokyo, or later a sister cafe in Hakodate, gives him a quiet space to watch ordinary people wrestle with very human problems. Readers who like gentle speculative fiction often connect with the warmth of the setup, the repetition of the rules, and the way each linked story bends toward empathy instead of spectacle.

The books are often described as comforting, but they do not dodge hard subjects. Dementia, death, separation, guilt, and family strain all run through the series. What makes the reading experience gentle is Kawaguchi's steady belief that people can face painful truths without being crushed by them.

The series has continued with Before We Forget Kindness and Before I Knew I Loved You, and Kawaguchi has increasingly met readers far from Japan, including a North American tour in 2024. He does not have a sprawling English-language bibliography. Instead, he has spent years deepening one imagined place and one question: if you were given a brief chance to step outside time, what would you really want to say before the coffee gets cold?