At Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s book signings, it’s not uncommon for fans to burst into tears.
His quirky fantasy series — set in a magical cafe in Tokyo where customers can travel back in time while their coffee cools — centers on ordinary people struggling with loss and regret who wish they could change the past. Readers often tell Kawaguchi that the stories helped them work through their grief, or led them to reconcile with an estranged relative or friend, he said.
“A comment I get a lot is, the books helped me heal,” Kawaguchi said through an interpreter during a visit to New York this fall.
A blockbuster in Japan, Kawaguchi’s series, “Before the Coffee Gets Cold,” has gained a global following, selling more than six million copies worldwide in 46 languages.
The fifth book in his series, “Before We Forget Kindness,” which was published in the United States on Tuesday, has drawn thousands of starred reviews on Goodreads (“I sobbed while reading,” a Goodreads user named Ally Fir, co-owner of The Mysterious Bookcase in Bournemouth, England, gushed in a typical five-star review.)
The series belongs to a booming genre called “healing fiction” — cozy, feel-good novels that have long been popular in Japan and Korea and are now catching on in translation around the world.
Fans of the genre say the heartwarming, whimsical stories offer comfort at a time when the world seems off-kilter and chaotic, and feel like an escape from distressing news about wars, political animosity and environmental disasters.
The novels typically take place in mundane locations — laundromats, convenience stores, diners, bookstores and cafes — but often have a dose of magical realism. They tend to be short and episodic, making them easy to read on a phone, which is how readers in Japan and Korea often consume books. They center on people dealing with everyday problems like heartache, loneliness and regret, and build up to a cathartic crescendo. Many of the novels feature cats with magical healing powers.
“With the turmoil of the post-pandemic era and the election, all people want is to feel good,” said Jessica Callahan, co-owner of Pocket Books, an independent bookstore in Lancaster, Pa., where there’s a display table of “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” and other healing fiction. “These books help them feel good.”
While healing fiction has long been popular in Japan and Korea, it’s only recently started to take off in translation. In the United States and England, where Kawaguchi’s series has sold more than three million copies, publishers have released dozens of healing novels in translation and are rushing to acquire more.
“After his success, we really started seeing more publishers acquiring and bringing in more of these quiet, healing, translated novels,” said Shannon DeVito, director of books at Barnes & Noble.
Recent releases of cozy Japanese novels include Mai Mochizuki’s “The Full Moon Coffee Shop,” set in a magical coffee shop run by talking cats; Hisashi Kashiwai’s “The Kamogawa Food Detectives,” which takes place in a Kyoto diner where the food evokes forgotten memories; Sanaka Hiiragi’s “The Lantern of Lost Memories,” about a photo studio where the recently deceased relive important moments from their life; and Michiko Aoyama’s “What You Are Looking For Is In the Library,” which centers on a Tokyo librarian whose book recommendations help readers realize their dreams.
Publishers have also snapped up Korean novels like Jungeun Yun’s “Marigold Mind Laundry,” about a magical laundromat where customers can erase unhappy memories, and Miye Lee’s “The Dallergut Dream Department Store,” about a department store that sells dreams, which sold more than a million copies.
Sivan Sardar, who lives in Leeds, England, and works in marketing, got addicted to healing fiction after she picked up a copy of “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” in 2022.
“I was crying like an absolute fool,” said Sardar, who posted an emotional review of the novel on TikTok that drew more than a million views.
She’s since read all the translated titles in Kawaguchi’s series and has accumulated a whole shelf of healing fiction.
“They all kind of have the same vibe,” she said. “It really does feel healing. You do feel good afterward, despite crying.”
It’s rare to see a new fictional genre in translation attract such a large readership in English. Some publishers compared the surging interest in healing fiction to the explosion in Scandinavian noir that followed the success of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy more than a decade ago.
“This is the biggest translation boom we’ve had in a while,” said Sara Nelson, an executive editor at Harper Perennial, which published Satoshi Yagisawa’s best seller “Days at the Morisaki Bookshop” and its sequel, “More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop.”
Nelson said the genre is resonating with readers in part because the novels promise escape from the turbulence and uncertainty of the present.
“Some of them have time travel, and everybody loves time travel, especially when current times are so scary and freaky,” she said.
Another significant driver of the genre’s appeal? Cats.
“There’s always a cat,” Nelson said.
Several cat-themed Japanese healing novels have become breakout hits in translation, like “The Cat Who Saved Books,” Sosuke Natsukawa’s novel about a talking cat who rescues unwanted and unread books. Natsukawa’s sequel, “The Cat Who Saved the Library,” is due out in the United States next spring.
“There’s a self-care aspect to these books,” said Judith Curr, president and publisher of the HarperOne group at HarperCollins, who acquired Natsukawa’s novels.
Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Random House that publishes romance and commercial fiction, has also snapped up a handful of cozy, cat-centric novels from Japan.
Cindy Hwang, the vice president and an editorial director of Berkley, said she first encountered the genre when a British publisher sent her Hiro Arikawa’s “The Travelling Cat Chronicles.” The novel, narrated partly by a sarcastic cat who takes a road trip across Japan with the man who rescued him, made her “cry buckets,” she said.
Along with “The Travelling Cat Chronicles,” Berkley also published Arikawa’s sequel, “The Goodbye Cat,” and recently released Syou Ishida’s best seller, “We’ll Prescribe You a Cat,” about a clinic in Kyoto where patients are sent home with cats instead of medicine. An English translation of the sequel — naturally titled “We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat” — is coming out next fall, Hwang said.
Cats are such a staple in healing fiction that Kawaguchi’s publishers in the United States and Britain added a fluffy brown cat to the covers of “Before the Coffee Gets Cold,” even though, in a break from tradition, cats are not central to his novels.
“Nothing says cozy and comfortable and curling up like a cat does,” Neil Gudovitz, Kawaguchi’s agent, said.
On a sunny morning in September, Kawaguchi sat in a conference room at his publisher’s office in downtown Manhattan, where he had come to sign 1,000 copies of “Before We Forget Kindness.” He was joined by an interpreter and his editor from Sunmark, a Japanese publisher that specializes in self-help and nonfiction, including Marie Kondo’s mega best seller “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.”
Kawaguchi never set out to write fiction, he said. Born in Osaka, where his parents ran a barbershop, he moved to Tokyo after college to become a manga writer, but failed to get published. A former high school classmate who was working in theater asked him to write a play, and Kawaguchi discovered he had a knack for dialogue.
Kawaguchi first wrote “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” as a play. It caught the attention of Ruriko Ikeda, an editor at Sunmark who attended a performance and found herself moved to tears.
“I was crying my eyes out,” Ikeda said through an interpreter. She wrote to Kawaguchi and eventually convinced him to adapt the play as a novel.
After “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” was published in Japan in 2015, booksellers helped turn it into a phenomenon. It sold more than a million copies and was adapted into a feature film. Kawaguchi went on to write five more novels set in the time-travel cafe.
International publishers pounced, and translation rights sold in more than 40 languages, including Macedonian, Malay, Georgian and Mongolian.
In the United States, “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” quickly caught on with librarians and booksellers after it was published by Hanover Square Press in the fall of 2020, when the pandemic was raging. Sales surged after readers posted emotional videos on TikTok, where posts about the series have generated more than 28 million views.
This year, Kawaguchi held events in Romania, Poland, New Zealand, Italy and the United Arab Emirates, and made his first trip to North America, with appearances in Toronto, Los Angeles and New York City.
Wherever he goes, fans often tell him what they would do if they could go back in time.
“At his signings, people are overcome,” said Peter Joseph, editorial director of Hanover Square Press. “People are looking for solace.”
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