Before I Knew I Loved You
by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Translated by Geoffrey Trousselot
Purchase on Amazon | Bookshop.org | Libro.fm
Hanover Square Press | HarperCollins | May 26, 2026
Today is White Day. Observed on March 14 across Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and much of East Asia: on Valentine's Day, girls give chocolate to boys. On White Day, the boys give something back. I finished this book this week, and I can't think of a better day to write about it.
Before I Knew I Loved You is the sixth book in Toshikazu Kawaguchi's café series, translated, as always, by Geoffrey Trousselot. If you have been here before, you know the café. Funiculi Funicula sits in Jimbocho, Tokyo's neighborhood of used bookshops, named after a Neapolitan folk song. It is small and dimly lit, and one seat allows whoever sits in it to travel through time. The rules are the same as they have always been. You can only visit someone who has been to the café before. You cannot leave your seat or you will be pulled back to the present immediately. Nothing you do will change what happens when you return. And you must drink your coffee before it gets cold, or you will not return at all.
Four new visitors sit down in this book.
What It's About
The four stories are titled The Runaway, The Patient Man, The Secret, and The Father and Son. A daughter who could not bring herself to call her mother. A man who sent a message to his girlfriend and waited, and waited, and never heard back. A woman who does not want to look behind her. She wants to look ahead. A student who lost his father and is not finished with him yet.
The love in this book spans generations in both directions: love moving upward toward a parent, love moving forward toward a child, love moving sideways toward a partner who went quiet.
What is new here, and what gives this book a different texture from its predecessors, is the café's youngest guests. These are not people at the end of something. Several of them are at the beginning, which means the grief is different. It is both grief of loss and of not knowing: not having said something yet, not being sure what comes next.
What Stuck With Me
I can't pick a favorite story. I tried. I can't do it.
What I keep returning to is what Kawaguchi does in The Secret. The woman who sits down in that story doesn't travel back. She travels forward, which he has allowed before but not often. She glimpses her own future and people she doesn't yet know. And then those people appear in the other stories, building toward the moment she already witnessed.
I don't know whether this is a setup for a seventh book or simply a structural experiment. Either way, I can't wait to see what comes next. Every time I step back into this café, I feel like I have been let back in somewhere I belong.
The White Day connection is there, and I will leave it for you to find. The timing of this review is not accidental.
My Takeaway
If you already love the series, this book will not disappoint. For anyone stepping into Asian healing literature for the first time, this series is the perfect place to start, and this entry is as warm and complete as the café has ever felt.
Kawaguchi doesn't fix anything. He just makes you feel less alone inside what hasn't been fixed yet.
Read it on a quiet afternoon. Have something warm to drink.
If you loved Days at the Torunka Café or Hot Chocolate on Thursday, this one belongs on the same shelf.
I received an advance copy of this book from Hanover Square Press | HarperCollins in exchange for an honest review. This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through my link, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
