A review by thereadingmum
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Did not finish book. Stopped at 14%.

I'm fairly sure some of the tone has been lost in translation or else I'm just not used to it. Other than that I got inordinately annoyed with both Fumiko and Kazu. While Fumiko may be acting on her heart break and regret at having let her boyfriend go, her crazed, arrogant, obnoxious manner is really off-putting. While Kazu, clearly reluctant to let Fumiko go back in time, doesn't explain things properly to her. She does it piece-meal and gives one line then lets Fumiko go off on her tangent. The clinker was when she told Fumiko about the ghost, allows her to get cursed, is snide about it and then continues to take her time explaining. I wanted to slap Kazu. If the rest of the book continues in this vein I think I'll pop a blood vessel. 

However, clearly a lot of people have loved this book and its sequels, so I am in the itty bitty minority here. If, like me, you prize straight talking and not mucking about, I think you also may find this too hard to plow through.