Returning to Café Funiculi Funicula for the fourth time felt much like visiting a familiar local cafe (without the time travel). I knew the dim underground ambience, the mysterious woman reading in the special chair and the rules governing every journey to the past.
Nothing said or done during the visit can change the present. Travellers can't leave the chair, and they can only meet someone who's previously been to the café. Most importantly, they have to finish their coffee before it goes cold to return to the present.
By now, I can recite those rules alongside Kazu.
Before We Say Goodbye again follows four visitors carrying the weight of conversations they never properly finished: a husband who failed to tell his wife something important, a woman who couldn't say goodbye to her dog, a woman who never answered a marriage proposal and a daughter haunted by the way she treated her father.
The structure is familiar, but the question behind it still works. If the past can't be changed, would one final conversation be worth having?
Kawaguchi understands that grief is rarely limited to missing someone. It can also contain guilt, anger and the fear that we misunderstood the relationship while we still had time to repair it.
Each visitor has allowed one painful moment to define an entire relationship. They're not trying only to see someone again. They want to know whether they failed them.
I found the story involving Sunao and her golden retriever, Apollo, the most touching. Sunao and her husband couldn't have children, and Apollo became their family. When he reached the end of his life, she promised to remain beside him but fell asleep from exhaustion. He died while she was sleeping, leaving her convinced that she'd abandoned him when he needed her most.
Anyone who's loved and lost an animal will understand why that guilt becomes so consuming. We can't ask them what they need from us or whether they understand what's happening. We can only stay close and hope our love has been obvious.
Kawaguchi treats Sunao’s grief with complete seriousness. Apollo isn't used as a sentimental break between the human relationships. Their bond matters in its own right, and the eventual understanding Sunao receives is both painful and deeply comforting.
The other stories consider regret within marriage, romantic love and the relationship between a father and daughter. Again and again, someone discovers that the meaning they attached to a final encounter wasn't the only possible interpretation.
That remains the strongest idea in the series. The café can't change the facts, but it can change how those facts are understood.
A missed goodbye can stop feeling like abandonment. Silence can be seen as fear rather than indifference. An overbearing parent can be seen as someone who loved deeply but expressed it badly. The past remains intact, yet its hold over the present starts to loosen.
I also appreciated the final story’s connection to the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami of 2011. Placing one family’s loss within a national tragedy gives the chapter a different weight. A private argument becomes unbearable because a catastrophe removes any ordinary opportunity to say sorry.
Kawaguchi doesn't erase responsibility from his characters. They still said the wrong thing, stayed silent or didn't understand someone they loved. What he offers them is a broader view of the relationship, one where a single regretted moment doesn't have to become its whole meaning.
The repetition is becoming hard to ignore.
I understand why the rules need to be included for readers who begin with this instalment. But, they're explained at considerable length, sometimes more than once in each seperate story. For anyone who's read the previous books, these sections slow the story just as its emotional momentum begins to build.
The overall pattern has also become predictable. A visitor arrives believing the worst about themselves or the person they lost. They return to the past and discover that an apparently hurtful action was motivated by love. They receive the reassurance they need before drinking the coffee and returning to the present.
The individual circumstances are moving, but I'd like a future story to resist such a tidy resolution. Not every final conversation provides an answer. Not every act that causes pain can be softened by good intentions. Leaving one visitor with a more complicated understanding might give the series some new emotional ground.
I also had reservations about the story involving an unanswered marriage proposal. What 's presented as a loving sacrifice involves one person withholding important information and deciding what the other should know. The intention may be protective, but that doesn't make the decision entirely fair.
Kawaguchi tends to place forgiveness ahead of accountability. That generosity is part of the appeal of these books, but it can simplify relationships that deserve closer scrutiny.
The prose is direct and accessible, although the narration occasionally explains feelings that are already apparent from the conversation. A little more trust in the reader would allow certain scenes to land with greater force.
Before We Say Goodbye doesn't reinvent the series, and it's beginning to show the limitations of its established formula. The repeated rules and familiar emotional progression prevent this instalment from feeling as fresh as it could have.
But I was still moved by these characters and the questions they brought into the café. Apollo’s story alone stayed with me long after I finished reading, while the final chapter understood how easily one angry conversation can become unbearable after an unexpected death.
Kawaguchi writes with compassion for people who've made mistakes and then punished themselves far beyond the moment itself. His characters can't recover the futures they might have shared, but they can stop allowing one painful memory to speak for an entire relationship.
The coffee always grows cold. The value of the journey lies in finally saying what should never have been postponed.
☕ Read this if you enjoy Japanese healing fiction and gentle magical realism
⏳ Four interconnected stories set inside a time-travelling café in Tokyo
💞 Final encounters involving spouses former partners parents children and a beloved dog
🫶 Grief regret guilt forgiveness and the words left unsaid
🌸 An emotional story about reinterpreting the past when its outcome cannot be changed
⚠️ Contains death terminal illness brain injury pet loss natural disaster and severe grief
Book Details
Before We Say Goodbye by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Paperback ISBN
978-1035023431 — Picador paperback edition published in Australia on 12 September 2023.
Hardcover ISBN9
78-1035023424 — Picador first-edition hardcover published in the United Kingdom in September 2023.
eBook ISBN
978-1035023448 — Picador digital eBook edition published on 12 September 2023.
Audiobook ISBN
978-1035023455 — Picador unabridged digital audiobook edition published on 14 September 2023.
Genre
Translated Fiction; Contemporary Fiction; Magical Realism; Literary Fiction; Fantasy; Time-Travel Fiction; Japanese Fiction
Subgenre
Contemporary Japanese Fiction; Philosophical Fiction; Speculative Fiction; Café Fiction; Grief Fiction; Interconnected Stories; Domestic Fiction; Healing Fiction
Tropes / Literary Threads
Time travel with strict rules; return before the coffee gets cold; the past cannot be changed; final conversations; reunion with lost loved ones; words left unsaid; death of a beloved pet; unanswered marriage proposal; estranged parent and child; hidden illness.
Publisher
Picador — an imprint of Pan Macmillan — publishes the paperback, hardcover, digital and audiobook editions available to English-language readers.
Series
Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Book Four — preceded by Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Tales from the Café and Before Your Memory Fades and followed by Before We Forget Kindness and Before I Knew I Loved You.
Formats Available
Paperback; Hardcover; eBook; Kindle; EPUB; Unabridged Digital Audiobook.
Audiobook Narrator
Kevin Shen
Audiobook Length
Approximately 4 hours and 40 minutes for the unabridged English-language recording.
Original Release Date
20 September 2021 — first published in Japan by Sunmark Publishing under the title Sayonara mo Ienai Uchi ni.
Australian Release Date
12 September 2023 — Picador paperback and digital eBook editions released in Australia.
Page Count
192 pages — Picador paperback edition with ISBN 978-1035023431.
Where to Buy Before We Say Goodbye by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
📚 Amazon
Affiliate Disclosure
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. If you purchase through my Amazon affiliate links, I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. I also encourage supporting Australian booksellers such as QBD Books, independent booksellers, and self-published authors whenever possible.
Danielle Robinson is a literary critic and writer whose
work explores literature through the
lens of atmosphere, memory, culture, and emotional experience. Holding a double degree in philosophy and theology, she combines academic insight with a deeply refined aesthetic sensibility shaped by more than three decades working across the creative industries as an internationally published, multi-award-winning makeup artist, fashion stylist, and interior stager.
She reads widely and rigorously, reading and reviewing more than 200 books each year as both an ARC reader and commissioned critic. Through Silk & Sentences, Danielle approaches literature as something immersive and lived with — not simply stories to consume, but works that shape the way we think, feel, and move through the world.
She writes from her semi-rural Queensland home, where she lives with Alex, her husband of 33 years, their dogs Oscar and Paige, and an ever-growing library of books.
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