Before We Say Goodbye

The fourth book in Toshikazu Kawaguchi's Before the Coffee Gets Cold series returns to the Tokyo cafe where a single seat lets visitors travel back in time — but only until their coffee goes cold, and only in ways that leave the present unchanged.

Four new visitors take that seat: a professor who never told his wife how happy she made him; a woman still grieving how her dog's final moments went, alone; a woman revisiting a proposal that didn't lead where she expected; and a story that reaches back into the cafe's own history, tying its resident ghost to the present-day staff.

As in the earlier books, each visit is less about altering what happened than about finally saying, or understanding, what was left unsaid. Quiet and gently melancholic, it closes threads that have run through the series since the first book while standing on its own.