Hello from a Japan still on the edge of sweltering! I was standing outside a temple in Yamagata a few nights ago waiting for a friend to finish his mountain ascetic training, just standing at seven p.m., not moving, and jeepers was I soaked, sweat was shooting out of every little hole all over my body. If there was a hole, it was secreting. And none of it was evaporating, which only caused more sweating for my confused body. My shirt was soaked. My pants were soaked. I stank. My cameras glistened with my juices. I stood there listening, coruscating, to all the ascetics sing their ascetic songs on the temple grounds, reflecting on the fact that this — this weather, dire heat, unbearable heat — already is a serious issue around the world, but for Japan, for its lower elevations, the hit on productivity and the cost of air conditioning — well, damn, it’s going to be expensive by every metric.
No deep insight; just putting a pin in the summer of 2024, a little notch in the belt of the universe for when things felt like they went a bit too sideways, like the taking on of water tipped us into the beyond, and it’s no longer about mitigation, but response. If you haven’t experienced a summer like this, it is truly unimaginable. The great thing about being in a sauna (and the thing that keeps you from, say, hyperventilating in one) is knowing you can leave the sauna. The door opens, coolness awaits. Tokyo summers, not so. Tokyo summers — the Hotel California of saunas, Mad Max: Swelterdome.
Anyway! I’m on a train now (still sweating; relentless! the beating sun!) on my way into the countryside to do some research. Grateful for trains, the majesty of trains.
TBOT Random House September Updates
First: Thank you for the rapturous response to the Random House cover reveal a few weeks ago. Here is a reminder of the actionable items you can help with:
Consider pre-ordering from your local bookshop. I’ve heard conflicting reports — some folks have had no issues pre-ordering. Others have been told it’s “too early” and to “come back in a few months.”
If you do pre-order, please keep your pre-order receipts. (And if you pre-order at a local bookshop, I’ll take a “I’ve pre-ordered at shop X” as evidence enough.) I will be announcing a slew of pre-order perks in November, and you’ll be able to use those receipts to redeem.
For now, I’m waiting on the copy edit back from Random House. Marketing team meeting forthcoming. I have to update / redesign the map page. Write acknowledgements. And give it yet another read. (And then another. So many reads, so much anxiety about a wrong word, a double-space.) And then maybe (maybe??) we’re … done??
Kissa by Kissa Japanese Edition
In other book news, I’m excited to announce the forthcoming publication of Kissa by Kissa in Japanese: 『KISSA BY KISSA 路上と喫茶ー僕が日本を歩いて旅する理由』
It will be published by BOOKNERD — one of my favorite bookshops in all of Japan, and publisher of excellent literary things. (And a bookshop-publisher utterly beloved by bookshops Japan over.) Also, BOOKNERD is a Morioka community hub, a place of literary discussion and art exhibitions. Having Kissa by Kissa’s Japanese edition published by a Morioka publisher feels like a beautiful closing of some circle. I’m grateful for Hayasaka-san — the owner of BOOKNERD — for taking on this project, for working to bring Kissa by Kissa to a Japanese audience. And for Imai Eiichi for his excellent translation. (And for Adrian Hogan for his forthcoming cover illustration!)
The book will be of a different ilk than our fine art edition; smaller and softcover, retailing for ¥2,500 (about $18 USD). This is the price-point wheelhouse for BOOKNERD and his devout followers. The idea is to produce something pocketable, small, something to take with you on your walk, softcover, gentle — a gentle edition. I’m psyched to see it! I held the dummy yesterday and it felt great. Really special, and redolent with notes of “Japanese publishing.” We’re nailing down the cover over the next week. And editing is in final copy stages. Here’s an interesting little note I got from translator Imai-san, as we figure out literary shading:
細かいところですが・・・
▼ 美味しい、おいしい （一応、美味しい と書いています）
▼ 煙草、タバコ、たばこ （煙草、がいいかなと）
▼ 数字を今、漢数字（縦書きなので）にしていますが、それでいいかどうか
Write a certain word (“delicious” or “tobacco” for example) using Chinese characters, Hiragana, or Katakana (or a mix) and the nuance is entirely different. A word like tobacco exists in all three sets (pronounced identically; this is where the playfulness of written and spoken Japanese diverge), and each evokes a different era or vibe. All these details add up, and of course, aren’t present in English (which doesn’t have such explicit distinctions). Translating: Fun!
We’re going to throw a big party in Morioka in on November 23. Details forthcoming, but if you’re in town / Tokyo / Japan, mark the date, consider swinging by. It’s going to be a great event.
I’ve created a short anonymous form (20 seconds to fill out) to get a sense of:
who among you are interested in buying the Japanese edition, and
how many people might come to the launch party
Please fill it out if you have a moment. It will be helpful to us! Many thanks!
Palma-lution
Pizza on the beach, Palma in hand, I have a bunch of stuff I’ve been meaning to link to for ages, and so let me do that now, here. My preferred stack for reading longform essays / journalism is a combo of Readwise Reader and a BOOX Palma with Obsidian sucking up all the highlights. (Disclaimer: I’m an advisor for Readwise, so if you have issues / features requests, feel free to send them to me; and BOOX sent me a couple devices for free last month, though well after I bought the Palma with my own cash, and they have no bearing on me talking about the device.)
A side note: I’m not saying that I catalyzed The Great Palma Movement of 2024, but I’m not not saying that either. Since posting my notes on Digital Reading in 2024 in May, and a couple banal threadsabout the Palma in March and April, the device has gone sort of meteoric / memetic. You can trace David Pierce’s picking one up to my Roden issue. His piece amplified device-awareness significantly, which I’m sure lead to MKBHD grabbing one — he reviewed it last week, putting it in front of the eyeballs of millions.
Influencer dominoes. Be careful what you blog.
I’m delighted by all of this because I still use the device daily (more than any of the other devices BOOX sent me to play around with), and I am reading, highlighting, and synthesizing more than ever. It’s my favorite piece of tech of the last few years. Can it be better? Of course, but voting in favor of eink in this form factor, is a vote in favor of digital reading and longform writing. I love it. If you buy one with this link I’ll stand to make literally dozens of dollars.
Swissmiss (aka Tina Roth Eisenberg) recently ran a roll call for folks still being playful online, à la the World Wide Web in the early 2000s. HTML slinging, PHP wrangling, etc etc. Lots of interesting links in there. It’s good to see so many people still blogging / updating their homepages, and even better to see so many dorks maintaining their own home-rolled, independently-owned nooks.
Why is maintaining your own online independent nook important? Because the big companies are all fraught, you just have to choose which level of fraught you are willing to stomach. Yes, terrible things are happening on X, but Meta has also catalyzed arguably far more terrible things on a far larger scale. Email and an Apache or Nginx web server are a couple of the last bastions of (mostly) apolitical online publishing mechanisms. And nobody can take them away from you or go out of business under you. You might lose some network effect bonuses, but as always: What is the scale you want to work at? And what gets you over that line?
Longtime Japan resident Derek Wessman (and maintainer of personal online nook) writes entertainingly about the romantic banalities of his life as a translator, businessman, and community leader in a western Tokyo suburb. Last year he was interviewed on TV about the ginkgo leaves changing color. On his blog, he picks up on something seemingly small, but noteworthy:
By far, the most satisfying thing was seeing how the segment got edited and broadcast. My name and position as 実行委員長 / Steering Committee Chairman were shown on the screen. There was no reference to or discussion of my country of birth, or why I am in the position. They did ask me to indicate how many years I have been chairman (around eight, by my count). To me this is the best kind of social progress: The implication that people who do not look and are not named in traditionally Japanese ways are just out there in society doing stuff, and this is normal enough that no particular discussion of it is needed. When people see that a news broadcast included such a scene without that discussion of nationality or otherness, it changes their perceptions more than any explicit discussion would. The way I envision it (wishfully, sure; indulge me), a viewer who would have expected that discussion wonders internally, “Hmm, they didn’t even mention this dude’s clear otherness. Maybe it’s getting common enough for non-traditional-looking people to simply do stuff that TV programs don’t discuss it anymore. Huh.” That is why I like to do community things, and to be on TV in this way.
In a broader Japan context: There’s a lot of chatter on the global internet about “super cheap Japanese homes” in the countryside. Yes, you can buy a two-hundred year old farmhouse for $20,000 (and then spend $100,000+ to make it habitable), but you’ll also be living out in the hinterlands, mostly likely need a car, be isolated from social activity, and need a non-trivial understanding of local cues / norms to fit in (not to mention you really will need Japanese to get most of this done sanely; also: I’m pretty sure you can buy cheap old homes in the bayou of Louisiana, too). The FCCJ breaks down why these things exist in the first place:
However, there is one category of heirloom that is becoming increasingly difficult to get rid of: real estate. Much has been reported in recent years about akiya, or vacant properties, mainly single family houses, with the foreign press trumpeting huge bargains to people in other countries where real estate can be unaffordable to the average person. In some areas of Japan you can even pick up a house for free under certain conditions.
But this news story tends to obscure the real reason for akiya, which is that the owner or the heirs of the owner don’t want the property and cannot sell or otherwise unload it. This problem will become increasingly serious as the boomers die out, since they were the first generation of Japanese who bought residential property en masse during a fairly short period. And since in Japan there has never been a market for used homes, or, at least, not on the same scale as in other countries, homeowners don’t keep their properties up the way homeowners in other countries do. More to the point, the homes the boomers bought up until the early 1990s were of poor quality because building standards were kept loose so that homes could be affordable to a larger cross-section of workers. Since then, standards have improved (although they still lag behind those in Europe and North America), but the fact remains: Japan is full of old houses that, in many cases, are uninhabitable without extensive, expensive renovations. After all, new homes in Japan are very affordable. Who needs to buy an old house that will need work when you can easily buy a brand new one?
I think we’re entering an era where a certain category of used post-1975 homes/apartments (“mansions”) will be far more attractive in the near future. Much aversion to “old” homes had to do with post-war realities — shoddy properties quickly slapped up in the 40s and 50s, tore down, rebuilt without earthquakes in mind, shifting laws in the 70s and 80s forcing more rebuilds to adhere to quake-proofing standards. More recently: “Red zone” expansions to mark landslip-prone areas, requiring more rigorous construction / retaining walls. Nobody under one-hundred-years-old has any real context for “long-lasting” or “investing back into” properties. I think this is what has driven most of the “I want to buy new” sentiment you see here. (As opposed to the oft-cited, hand-waving, “orientalized” framing of motivations.)
Fact: Structures built after say, 1980, are pretty solid, and if you can get over the habit of only buying new, there is a veritable market of incredible “vintage mansions” to be had in a city like Tokyo. Selling for a fraction of the price-per-meter-squared as many other major cities. Renovation has also boomed in recent years. And there’s arguably no country that does renovation more efficiently, professionally, and cost-effectively than Japan. Sure, lots of tower mansions starting at $1M USD a pop are going up around Tokyo, but I expect to see a major push towards renovations in this next decade. There will be a tipping point where younger families with less capital recognize that centrally-located and well-renovated beats sterile-new on the outskirts of town — in price, convenience, and “hipness.” Those abandoned farmhouses in the middle of nowhere will still be “free,” and still impossible to unload.
Speaking of affordable city housing, Hirayama, the protagonist in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023), lives as I lived for most of my time in Tokyo — in an old wooden apartment, with tatami mats, sleeping on the floor, books lined up alongside, days of solitude, looking, working. His rent in east-Tokyo — around Asakusa, near Skytree — is probably ¥60,000-¥90,000 ($420 - $560 USD). (For what it’s worth, I never paid more than $500-800/mo USD for a centrally-located apartment in my 15 years of renting in the city — and this is one of the main reasons I made Tokyo my base in my 20s, why it afforded me the “freedom” to pursue books and projects that weren’t inherently commercial.)
“Traveling was once a privilege, and being on the road was a state of grace, and not that many people dared to take that liberty,” Wenders told me in 2015. “But today, anybody can book a flight to the U.S. and rent a car or bike and go down Route 66 or feel like in Easy Rider.” But while the road is no longer as resonant a metaphor as it once was, the seeking goes on, maybe now more than ever.
In that sense, Perfect Days feels like a summational film, an end point for all those early wanderers. Hirayama has found the presence that Wenders’ previous characters (and the director himself) were looking for. “Those earlier movies are about searchers, characters who are seeking, but they don’t find it. Hirayama is not searching,” Wenders has said. “All of my films are dealing with that question of how to live, even though for a long time I did not know that, because I was searching for answers too. Perfect Days is quite a precise answer … In many ways, Hirayama is a perfect example of how to live.”
I was definitely searching during my 20s. And I was using affordable housing to protect my ability to search without compromise. Aloneness and solitude was nothing if not the cornerstone of my existence as an adopted person.
In Wenders’ (independent online nook alert) photobook, “Written in the West,” he writes about photography and solitude (but, I would argue, also a certain kind of general creativity):
Solitude and taking photographs are connected in an important way. If you aren’t alone, you can never acquire this way of seeing, this complete immersion in what you see, no longer needing to interpret, just looking … There’s a distinct kind of satisfaction that you get from looking and traveling alone, and it’s connected with this relation of solitude to photography … If you’re not alone you take different photos. I rarely feel the urge to take pictures if I’m not on my own.
The reason I do my huge walks alone is because, like Wenders notes, it’s the only way I can “see” and it’s the mode in which I feel the strongest impulse to photograph. It’s also the mode where the literary voice in the back of my head perks up and rattles off. Aloneness and solitude in my twenties was painful, but I think it did teach me how to “be alone” and make the most of it, to not be afraid of it. And I’ve tried to transmute as much of that learning into my work as possible.
Perfect Days is not a perfect film, but it is a very good film, and I think it shines a light on the kind of life that is possible in Tokyo, and accessible to almost anyone: A quietude and solitude that might drive some mad, but might be heaven for others. Wenders’ story is not one of pure romance, though. Hirayama the character clearly carries deep traumas, family relationships broken in the extreme. His response seems to have been to turtle into his tiny world, affordable and safe, to collect, to sacrifice himself to routine. I wish I had had a therapist in my 20s. And watching Perfect Days, I couldn’t shake the notion that Hirayama — now in his 50s — really could have used a therapist, too.
There is a strong possibility that Barack will pursue a political career, although it’s unclear. There is a little tension with that. I’m very wary of politics. I think he’s too much of a good guy for the kind of brutality, the skepticism.
And then:
… there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.
I mean, jeez. ❤️
In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, an author “competes” with chatGPT to write a “better beach read.” Interesting experiment, but it was pretty clear to me who was the human and who was the machine. There’s still a weird “circuity” to LLMs, and a “lack of curiosity” that seemed omnipresent in the machine-written story. Of course, this will soon be overcome. (Twenty seconds ago they couldn’t even do this.) Still, worth making note of these moments in their evolution.
I’ve read A River Runs Through It a dozen times (it’s that good / tight), but never any of the other stories in the collection. After reading Kathryn’s piece I went back and remedied that. While they don’t quite land like A River does, they are excellent, and I’m sad I didn’t read them sooner. As Kathryn writes, “his writing is elegiac without ever being nostalgic.“ A precise summation. Also worth noting: Norman didn’t publish A River until he was … seventy-three.
Garth Greenwell, a writer I greatly admire, has a new “novel” (autofiction?) out: Small Rain. I’m 20% through (Kindle book via Palma) and he’s basically just sitting in a hospital waiting room during the peak of Covid — I’m all in. Notes of Lynne Tillman.
In YouTube Land, Howtown is the best new science channel to launch in years. Joss Fong (Nook!) and Adam Cole are at the helm. They have a Patreon to support their work. Day-zero insta-sub. (And their Patreon is active and fun.)
Recently I was talking to a writer who described something she did whenever she moved to her writing table. I don’t remember exactly what the gesture was—there is something on her desk that she touches before she hits the computer keyboard—but we began to talk about little rituals that one goes through before beginning to write. I, at first, thought I didn’t have a ritual, but then I remembered that I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come. And she said, Well, that’s a ritual. And I realized that for me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular … Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.
Being there before a thing’s arrival — this is what all the work — all the prep — is about. This is where your billion hours of effort pay dividends: In knowing where things may appear, and being there in time to witness their emergence. Solitude not only helps, but is essential.
OK — back to shoveling emails and ticking off other mundane to-dos. Hope you’re all well out there. In the two days since I started this, the mornings have had the slightest — ever so slightest — hint that cooler climes may be approaching. Still Sweltersville, but we can just about see the door out of the sauna in the far distance.
Again thanks for all the kind notes and support on Random House TBOT. Can’t wait to get it to you all.
