cornellbox (books) stopped reading Before the coffee gets cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
I just bounced off of this one, and bailing at the halfway point. There's just not been enough of anything that made me want to keep on with it.
I find the writing (more likely the translation) to be clumsy and awkward, and that makes it difficult to get into the story if you're constantly getting rubbed the wrong way.
A couple times within a couple pages, a temperature of 86F was mentioned. That's oddly specific, and was strange in the places and ways it was being mentioned. 86F is 30C, and a round number like that would make sense and would feel right in the context, where 86 was jarring. It felt transliterated rather than translated, in a way I just can't get past.
