Meeting with Japanese writer Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Join us for a meeting with the bestselling writer, author of the "Before the Coffee Cools Off" book series - Toshikazu Kawaguchi!

The meeting will be held on Friday 25/10/2024 from 10:15 - 12:00 in the A1 Auditorium at PJAIT.

The interview will be conducted by Piotr Milewski - writer, journalist, traveler and lecturer PJAIT. The meeting will be translated from Japanese into Polish by Ms. Aleksandra Wasyluk. 

After the hour-long interview, we anticipate time for book signings and individual meetings with the author. There will be an opportunity to purchase books during the meeting.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi's "Before the Coffee Cools Off" series is an international bestseller with multi-million dollar sales. Subsequent volumes are constantly gaining new admirers who have come to love the stories from an intimate Tokyo coffee shop and their characters, who face dilemmas that are close to anyone who has lost touch with a loved one. The popularity of the series in Poland is very high - sales of the series in our country are more than 300,000 copies. The first two volumes received the title of Book of the Year 2022 and 2023 in the Lubimy Czytać Readers' Poll.PL, and Vouchers for a 3-hour autograph session at the Krakow Fair sold out in less than 10 minutes.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi - born in 1971, a producer, director and playwright in the Sonic Snail theater group. Prior to its book publication, "Before the Coffee Cools" was a play that won the top prize at the Suginami Drama Festival. The novel also received a film adaptation directed by Ayuko Tsukahara and sold more than 3 million copies worldwide.

A few words about history

The title "Before the Coffee Cools Off" was originally an award-winning play written by Toshikazu Kawaguchi and adapted by him into a series of best-selling novels translated into many languages. After the huge success of the first book, the author wrote the sequels, the first three of which are already well known to Polish readers, and the fourth will be published in Poland on October 23, 2024.

What are the books in the series about?

The books in the "Before the Coffee Cools Off" series focus on a fascinating idea: a small coffee shop in Tokyo gives guests the opportunity to travel back in time, but it must follow strict rules. Guests can only travel to the past, sitting in a specific seat in the cafe, and must return before the coffee cools off. It is also important that their return to the past will not change the future. The characters decide to travel back in time driven by different emotions - grief, love, gratitude or shame - and their stories create a moving and reflective tale of humanity, drawn with clean lines and enclosed in the minimalist setting of an intimate cafe.