Toshikazu Kawaguchi 3 Books Collection Set [Before the Coffee Gets Cold; Tales from the Cafe & Before Your Memory Fades]

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Terry Hong of The Christian Science Monitor stated that the "narrative is occasionally uneven and tends to meander" but that the author "has a surprising, unerring ability to find lasting emotional resonance. If I didn’t have stacks of other Japanese authors yet to read i would go for it but it doesn’t sound like it deserves to bump them out of my list. Kohtake, a nurse longing to meet her husband before his Alzheimers’ deteriorated and he no longer remembers her; Hirai, who wishes to tell her little sister her regrets for shunning her and Kei, who wishes to travel to the future to see if her unborn child had a chance to live. However, the shortcomings are counteracted with the tantalizingly slow and gentle narrative progression, which focuses on the themes of human emotions and the human condition rather than dramatic, suspenseful subplots. A short book which seemed too long amd repetitive for me (like how it happened with Autumn by Ali Smith).

Their narratives are delicately woven together to produce a tale of love, loss, and hope that is sure to bring a few tears to your eyes. It’s a waste of a great character (the film, predictably, has decided that the best way to expand her role is to introduce a love interest absent from the book…), and while we don’t need to know all of her, and the café’s, secrets, a little would have gone a long way.Although we meet many new characters and hear their unique stories in each book, we get to know the cafe owners and their friends and family over the course of the series, with their own secrets and mysteries uncovered along the way.

Despite the knowledge that their actions cannot change the present, the opportunity to express what they never got around to saying before may eventually make a small difference in their own lives, and that’s better than nothing. Although the setting is quite simplistic, the charm of the gloomy old cafe is evident in Kawaguchi’s writing. The first story feels so old fashioned, with a girl crying over being left by a guy and this just continues. br br Heartwarming, wistful, mysterious and delightfully quirky, Toshikazu Kawaguchi's internationally bestselling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time? And there are a few more caveats to keep in mind too; you can only time travel when sitting in a particular seat within the cafe, and you must not move from that seat when you do travel to the past.Translated fiction is something I am trying to read more of, and seeing as this book is just about everywhere, it seemed like a great one to read. At Books2Door, we believe that reading is a fundamental skill that every child should have to help improve their vocabulary, grammar, and critical thinking skills. Though the occasional dispassionate tone and the repetitiveness in the text did bother me slightly, overall I did enjoy the read and look forward to reading the next installment in this series.