By the third book in a series built around the same café, the same rules and the same rapidly cooling cup of coffee, you could expect the idea to have worn itself pretty thin.
But, somehow, Toshikazu Kawaguchi continues to find new emotional territory inside a premise that now feels comfortingly familiar, even when the storytelling itself begins to show signs of repetition.
Before Your Memory Fades is the third book in the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, but this time we leave Tokyo’s Café Funiculi Funicula for Café Donna Donna on the slopes of Mount Hakodate. The view is different, the clientele is new and there's a little more room for the world of these strange cafés to expand. The important rules, though, remain the same.
Customers can travel into the past or future, but they can't change what's already happened. They can only meet someone who has visited the café, they have to stay in one particular chair and they must finish their coffee before it gets cold. If they fail to do that, they'll turn into a ghost trapped in the café.
It's still a smart restriction because it takes away the most obvious reason for travelling through time. Nobody can stop a death, undo an accident or cure an illness. The only thing that can change is the traveller’s understanding of what happened.
The novel follows four interconnected stories: a daughter who resents the parents who died and left her orphaned; a comedian unable to imagine his life without his wife; a woman whose grief over her younger sister has consumed everything else; and a young man who recognises his love for his childhood friend when time could already be running out.
These stories deal with death, serious illness, suicide, abandonment and the guilt that can accompany surviving someone we love. That makes the book sound relentlessly bleak, but it isn’t. Kawaguchi is interested in what happens after despair has convinced someone that happiness would be a betrayal. Again and again, his characters discover that continuing to live doesn't mean loving the dead any less.
The first story was especially effective because it does more than just provide its central character with a final conversation. Yayoi has spent her life believing that her parents abandoned her by dying. That belief might not be rational, but grief formed in infancy rarely is. Her anger has become the explanation around which she's built her identity.
When she travels to the past, she learns that her mother’s childhood was painfully similar to her own. The story then becomes less about forgiving dead parents and more about recognising how suffering can repeat itself through families. It also contains one of the book’s most effective uses of the time-travel premise, bringing mother and daughter together in a way that changes neither history nor its outcome but changes how both women understand their place in it.
The second and third stories explore the belief that grief has to be preserved to prove love. One character plans to remain in the café and become a ghost rather than go back to a life without his wife. Another has withdrawn from her fiancé because she can't permit herself to be happy after her sister’s death.
This is where the rules of the café become more than a charming device. The chair offers a way to visit the past, but staying in it forever means becoming trapped. That's quite a direct metaphor for grief, but it works. Memory can connect us to someone who has died, but it can also become the place where we stop living.
For me, the final story was the strongest. Reiji is an aspiring comedian working at Donna Donna, while his childhood friend Nanako has been concealing her illness and the extent of her fear. Their story looks at the way people hide pain because they believe secrecy is a type of protection. Nanako doesn't want Reiji to sacrifice his ambitions for her, but in trying to spare him, she also denies him the opportunity to decide what she means to him.
The ending is painful without offering an easy consolation. Love doesn't defeat death and a promise doesn't guarantee the future. What it can do is ensure that someone doesn't face an unsure ending without knowing they were chosen.
Sachi was another highlight. At seven years old, she's the only person currently able to pour the time-travelling coffee. She carries a book titled What If the World Were Ending Tomorrow? One Hundred Questions and has a habit of asking adults exactly what they'd prefer not to answer. She's bright, observant and never written as just an adorable child there to soften the heavier material.
My main reservation, again, is the repetition. By this point in the series, I know the rules of the café extremely well. I knew them by the second explanation in this book, yet they continue to be restated. The same is true of the emotional structure. A visitor arrives carrying grief or regret. A meeting reveals information they didn't previously understand. The facts remain the same, but the visitor comes back able to face life differently.
It's absolutely an effective formula, but the mechanics are now too visible. Kawaguchi also has a tendency to explain an emotion after the dialogue has already made it clear. I'd have preferred some more trust in the reader and slightly less guidance towards the intended response.
The characterisation is also somewhat compressed. Each visitor is predominantly defined by one loss and one relationship, while the dead are often unusually wise and selfless. This suits the fable-like nature of the series, but it limits the psychological depth of people who are facing complicated and sometimes contradictory forms of grief.
Despite those reservations, I was invested in each encounter and deeply affected by the final one. The change of setting gives the series some needed space, while the returning characters preserve its sense of continuity. The stories about loss are sincere without suggesting that one conversation can remove it.
Before Your Memory Fades earns four stars because it accomplishes what it sets out to do. It's compassionate, accessible and emotionally effective, with a final story that gives the book considerably more weight. It falls short of five because the repeated explanations and familiar structure occasionally make the experience feel more manufactured than spontaneous.
Still, this series understands something important: most people wouldn't travel through time to witness a famous event or solve a historical mystery. They would go back for one ordinary conversation with someone whose absence has changed the shape of their life.
And they'd hope the coffee stayed hot long enough to say what they should have said before.
☕ Read this if you enjoy Japanese healing fiction and gentle magical realism
⏳ Four interconnected stories set inside a time-travelling café in Hakodate
💞 Final encounters between parents and children siblings spouses and childhood friends
🫶 Grief regret abandonment forgiveness and finding permission to live fully again
🌸 An emotional story about reinterpreting the past when its outcome cannot be changed
⚠️ Contains death terminal illness suicidal ideation attempted suicide orphanhood homelessness and severe grief
Book Details
Before Your Memory Fades by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Paperback ISBN
978-1529089431 — Picador paperback edition published in Australia on 30 August 2022.
Hardcover ISBN
978-1035081394 — Picador decorative special-edition hardcover published in Australia on 25 November 2025.
eBook ISBN
978-1761263439 — Picador digital eBook edition published in Australia on 30 August 2022.
Audiobook ISBN
978-1761689000 — Macmillan Digital Audio unabridged audiobook edition published in Australia on 1 September 2022.
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 deceased loved ones; childhood friends to lovers; hidden illness; unresolved grief; survivor’s guilt; regret and forgiveness; compassionate lies.
Publisher
Picador — an imprint of Pan Macmillan — publishes the paperback, special-edition hardcover and digital editions currently sold in Australia.
Series
Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Book Three — preceded by Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Tales from the Café and followed by Before We Say Goodbye, Before We Forget Kindness and Before I Knew I Loved You.
Formats Available
Paperback; Decorative Special-Edition Hardcover; eBook; Kindle; EPUB; Unabridged Digital Audiobook.
Audiobook Narrator
Kevin Shen
Audiobook Length
Approximately 6 hours and 31 minutes for the unabridged English-language recording.
Original Release Date
25 September 2018 — first published in Japan by Sunmark Publishing under the title Omoide ga Kienai Uchi ni.
Australian Release Date
30 August 2022 — Picador paperback and digital eBook editions released in Australia.
Page Count
224 pages — Picador paperback edition with ISBN 978-1529089431.
Where to BuyBefore Your Memory Fades by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
📚 Amazon
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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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