Amin Abbas

Toshikazu Kawaguchi is an acclaimed Japanese author best known for his novel, Before the Coffee Gets Cold  which sold more than 1.4 million copies and was adapted into a film in 2018.

In 2020, Before the Coffee Gets Cold became a bestseller in the UK and Italy and was a top seller on Amazon’s Audible in 2021. Its success has resulted in the book being translated into 32 languages.

The book’s popularity also resulted in Kawaguchi attending the 14th edition of the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature that was held from Feb. 4 – 14 in Dubai.

Kawaguchi told Arab News Japan how his “first novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold was originally written as a stage script, then Ms. Rumiko Ikeda, Sunmark Publishing’s editor, watched the play and asked me to rewrite the story as a novel.”

The novelist explained how his writing process begins by deciding the title, followed by creating relationships between his characters. After he lays the ground work, he begins writing the story. 

“I always try to capture the exchange of ideas and thoughts as revealed through conversation of characters. For me, the inspiration is always from the imaginary actors and actress in my head,” he said. 

He also shared how he is conscious of several things during the process, including making the story understandable, timeless and relatable for people from different countries and cultures. 

About the establishment of his career as a writer, Kawaguchi said: “I started to work on novels after I turned 40” and “It was a big challenge since I never wrote novels before,” highlighting how scripts and novels differ from one another. 

He pointed out how “in a stage play, an actor can express emotion with his face” and movement “but here I had to write all of that with written words. My heart was close to breaking many times. There was always a clear picture in my head, but I couldn’t always express it in written form as easily as I would have liked,” he added. 

Regardless of the challenges, the author expressed how he is glad the story has been read by many people globally. 

“I’m so honored that my stories are read by readers from different languages and cultures. I believe we all share this universal feeling for our beloved ones, and this feeling can go beyond walls of languages and cultures,” he told Arab News Japan.

Kawaguchi shared how the book “sold 220,000 copies in the UK, 120,000 copies in Taiwan and more than 200,000 copies in Italy. My Italian publisher told us that they will print 60,000 copies for my upcoming third work. This is just unbelievable, this number is a miracle for a new author like me, even here in Japan.”

Regarding his upcoming projects in the near future, Kawaguchi is working on another book in the series, as well as a short story.

Kawaguchi also shared some advice to aspiring novelists by asserting that it is “extremely important for you to finish your work to its end. This is a thing that I keep in my mind when I’m writing novels. Never stop along the way. Read it again and if you think that is not a perfect work, you must finish to its end.”

The author also listed some novels he enjoys including a historical Ninja novel called Hattori Hanzo written by Shinjuro Tobe and the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling.

About the most inspirational thing from Japanese culture that he admires, Kawaguchi said: “The answer is manga. My dream since I was an elementary school student was to be a manga artist. I loved reading manga, and I loved drawing it, too. I think manga has been a big influence on me, and has led me to create stories. Even now, when I am writing stories, I imagine how it would be expressed if written as manga. The same story can be expressed in totally different manners as manga, a novel, or a stage play. To see these differences is a good inspiration for me.”

Kawaguchi also visited the Middle East, and shared how he felt comfortable and at ease and expressed hope to live there.