This was my first time reading Narise Konohara, a BL author famous for her gritty, psychological, emotionally intense stories: and 箱の中 (Inside the Box) is no exception.
It was republished under a mainstream literary imprint, and while I have no time for the argument that this means it has inherently more artistic merit than other BL novels, it does say something about the themes of this story having a broader appeal. I admit I’ve felt a bit intimidated to break into Konohara’s body of work, which invariably comes with tags like “切ない” (painful) and “トラウマ” (trauma) on review sites- but Saki Aida’s DEADLOCK is my favourite Japanese novel, so I was excited to read another story tackling the topic of a falsely accused protagonist’s experience in prison. Now I’ve finished 箱の中, I definitely feel like it was an agonisingly memorable masterpiece, albeit one which was extremely gruelling to read- and with a few caveats.

Douno is facing a short sentence for a crime he didn’t do: he wouldn’t have faced prison at all if it wasn’t for his insistence on his innocence, which is the story’s first injustice. He’s a normal man, completely out of his depth in the brutal, bleak environment of Japanese jail, which is not only packed with violent criminals and yakuza, but also scam artists keen to capitalise on Douno’s naivety. Despite all the unsavoury characters jostling for attention, it seems like the greatest antagonist is the prison itself. Both the bleak daily life he has to adjust to and guards’ irrational cruelty are depicted in stifling, unbearably oppressive detail.

Just as Douno is driven to seriously contemplate taking his own life, he begins to make a connection with his strange, stoic cellmate Kitagawa. A younger man with a terrifying criminal past, so damaged by neglect that he’s childlike in his neediness. What follows is a relationship that would never have happened in any other context, which is what makes it so interesting; and the power dynamics are not clear-cut in the slightest. It’s clear that it’s bordering on unethical, but when you’re starved for warmth, comfort, praise, and a sexual outlet, they can all get jumbled up and impossible to extricate from each other.

The end of the title story left me fabulously unsettled, agitated and frustrated but also unable to deny that it was a fitting end: the story existed only insomuch as the two men were in captivity together, and the second that one man wasn’t, the driving energy of proximity fizzled into nothingness. Except, it’s never nothingness, is it? Because every intense relationship you have leaves its prints on you, indelibly, whether we like it or not.

The second story in the book, 脆弱な詐欺師 (which you could translate something like The Weak Fraudster) follows a private investigator tasked by Kitagawa to find Douno some years later. This is another deeply uncomfortable tale that unfolds with lurching inevitability, painting a perfect portrait of hypocrisy, while giving the reader another perspective on the complex character of Kitagawa. He’s a violent, terrifying man, but also vulnerable, human, damaged- and the intense ugliness of this story is beautifully crafted, with an occasionally almost unbearably delicate touch.

Finally, the third story, 檻の外, which was also released as a standalone sequel by Holly Novels, documents Douno and Kitagawa’s reunion on the outside. When Kitagawa finally re-enters Douno’s life, the latter is settled with a loving wife and a charming daughter. Despite the unconventional circumstances under which they first established their relationship, and Kitagawa’s continuing odd behaviour and habit of saying incredibly inappropriate things, Douno doesn’t shun Kitagawa or push him away, but instead invites him into the life he’s created. This is where I thoroughly expected worlds to collide, and Kitagawa’s strange and unstable personality to disrupt and dismantle Douno’s life. However, when Douno’s life does collapse, it comes from quite a different direction indeed. The end of the book left me completely reeling.

My one caveat about the novel is that I feel disappointed by the thread of misogyny I felt running through it. Right from the beginning, the central premise that gets Douno put in prison is a woman falsely accusing him of 痴漢 (molesting her on a train). The woman isn’t given any personhood at all in the story, not even a name, let alone a motive; and we’re supposed to believe that she took this false claim all the way through the courts, resulting in the judge taking her side and handing out a custodial sentence. That just isn’t the reality for victims of sexual assault, and women don’t have that kind of structural power to randomly send men to prison on a whim. I found it both off-putting and a strangely flimsy plot hole in an otherwise excellently constructed novel. While men are afforded interiority, allowed to be flawed and complicated, the female characters feel jarringly one-dimensional. Regardless, I enjoyed this novel enormously, will probably remember it forever, and would recommend it thoroughly to anyone who’s open to getting their feelings hurt.

Keeping reading notes is one of many things I’m obnoxiously zealous about, and in this post, I want to share both why I think it’s so great, and also some prompts to bounce off, if you’re struggling to get started.

I’ve written before about the practical system I use to keep reading notes, so if you’re interested in getting into Obsidian, check that out first! However, the ideas in this post can be used no matter what system you want to use.

Firstly, the manifesto:

why keep reading notes?

1. It makes me a better writer- and thinker. Having a space where I can explore ideas in relation to a text, with no pressure that anyone will ever read them, helps me come to conclusions and make connections that I might not have otherwise. Also, inevitably, through writing a lot and making it an integrated, playful part of my routine, I come up with thoughts or satisfying turns of phrase that could be useful for other writing. You get better at anything by doing lots of it, and one of those things is writing thoughts in your own words (more important than ever, in a time where lots of people are outsourcing that skill).

2. It makes me a better reader. Reading while knowing I’m going to scrawl some thoughts down at the same time means that I have an incentive to pay attention. I become an active participant in the experience. At the very least, I write the beats of the plot in my own words (or the key takeaways if its nonfiction), which means that I have to understand it myself. It’s like how explaining something you’re studying to someone else makes you understand it better yourself. And if I don’t understand what the author is trying to say, or even what is going on at all: I also write that down!

3. It’s a diary. Like how every portrait painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, every book notes entry is also a reflection on who I was at the time I was reading the book, how I felt, and what I took from the experience. The notes are anchored in time, and I can look back at them as a record of my life, far more insightful and interesting than a log of what I ate or did on a specific day.

4. For my bookclub, or other reading circles. When we’re reading a book together, I share my thoughts with the bookclub as I’m reading, and often I take on board others’ opinions, and quote them in my book notes too, turning the entry into an amalgamation of the best ideas that came up from the bookclub experience. It also means that if someone mentions picking up a certain book a couple of years after I’ve read it, I can look back at my notes and be part of the conversation again straight away, rather than that awful feeling of “I read it, I think I liked it, I cant remember anything about it.”

5. For being a better recommender: both to myself and others. Obsidian makes it easy to link associated ideas and concepts and recall them easily, which inevitably results in a top-down view of my own tastes, as I notice recurring themes that click with me; and those that don’t. I recently watched a youtube video where the creator complained about not being able to find books he enjoyed because “reddit always recommends the same 5 books, and (he) had already read most of those”. I was aghast. Why would you let the dorks on reddit dictate your taste? Yes, it’s hard to know what you vibe with when you’re starting out, but by taking reading notes, you build connections and slowly create a portrait of your own preferences, and gain confidence as to what kind of reader you are. Begin this wonderful journey right now!

   And of course, there is nothing like the feeling of recommending the perfect book for someone else, too. As I read more, and take more notes, I get better at suggesting books other people might like, or that might be useful for their specific situation. It would be easy to forget what a game-changer The Writing Meditation was for helping me establish habits that brought me closer to my goals, if I hadn’t written down how I felt about it when I was reading (and written that post).

So how to start?

Here are some prompts to play with, suitable for those entirely new to this, or anyone looking for some fresh angles. The most important thing is that none of this should feel like a chore, or homework. It’s a playful conversation between yourself and the book, and you should pick whichever prompt feels right, whichever one makes you think “oh, don’t get me started...!” rather than forcing something where nothing pops to mind.

There will be some books that you can’t think of anything to say about at all. That is a damning indictment on the book in itself. And it’s fine. Just move on.

Your notes do not have to be balanced, written in proper grammar, or useful to anyone but yourself. They can be chaotic, “problematic”, and you can write five paragraphs about the sex scene and nothing about anything else. You can rant about your personal beef with the author with impunity. You can swear!! You can get things wrong. You can say “this reminds me of a meme”. It’s all fine and it’s no one’s business.

the prompts

starting points

• What made you start this book? A friend suggested it, you saw it mentioned somewhere, the cover was pretty?

• Explain the plot in your own words. This might not feel useful, but it’s not only a nice record of what you thought was worth recording, but condensing information into key points is a good intellectual skill.

• Who were the characters? Summarise their main traits, or describe a scene that epitomised their personality.

• What was the most important scene, or your favourite scene (and why)?

• What was something you had to look up: a new word or concept?

• What did you expect to happen, and what actually happened?

• Where did you read it, and under what conditions? The book that I started while I was in the hall waiting for the JLPT exam to begin has a very different place in my brain than the one I binged in the bath.

thinking harder

• What were your favourite quotes, and why? How did they make you feel? What did they make you realise?

• How much did this book align with your personal taste, and is that different from how much would you recommend it to someone else?

• What was something new you learnt from the book, no matter how small?

• How did you feel during the first 25 pages, and how did you feel after you’d finished?

• What could have been different that would have made you enjoy it more?

• What was the main friction between the characters?

• (nonfiction) Where did you disagree with the author?

• Would you have felt differently about this book if you’d read it at a time in your past?

• If not you, who would hate this?

galaxy brain time

• What did the book make you want to do next? Even if it’s “avoid this author forever”. Or “become a pirate”.

• Are there comparisons you can make between the characters in this book, and other books you’ve read?

• If you’ve read other books by the same author, are there any quirks or motifs you can notice in common?

• If not you, who could this book be useful for?

• What assumptions is the author making about the world?

• What did the main character want? Did they get it?

• (nonfiction) What points from the book could be applied to your own life, however tenuously?

• What do you think are the key themes of the book? Can you go a layer deeper than your first try? If the theme is love: is it unrequited, fraternal, patriotic, misplaced, pure or tragic? If the word “theme” is hard to get to grips with, think: what is the book obsessed with? What can’t it shut up about?

final thoughts

I wrote 400,000 words about books that were life-changingly good, infuriatingly bad, and ones that I felt so conflicted about I couldn’t have thrashed out those feelings if I’d written another million words. But the point isn’t that it’s a competition to write lots of words: it’s that these words become a diary of your reading life, unique to you, and more valuable than you might expect.

When you turn around, you don’t see a barren blankness, like when the broom dogs in Alice in Wonderland brush away the path with their tails, but instead you’ll see a series of lamps you’ve left, illuminating all your past reading experiences and versions of yourself. Because reading isn’t just about reading: it’s about everything!

If you know any Japanese you might be familiar with the word randoku (乱読), made up from the kanji for ‘read’ and ‘riot, disorder’. A randokuka (乱読家) is someone who reads voraciously, extensively, across multiple genres, and often lots of books at the same time. I’ve always related to the randoku mindset- and reading a lot is what got me good at Japanese- but I also noticed a tendency in myself to be a lot better at starting books than finishing them. So, after multiple iterations, I came up with a system that enables me to embrace the chaos while also making sure that I’m moving forward every day. I’ve been using this system for 17 months-ish and have read over 110 books while under its wing.

To be clear, this isn’t a post about finding time for reading, keeping motivation with reading in a foreign language, picking what to read, or how to build a habit of reading: I’ve tackled all those topics before in a post I wrote at my last reading milestone here:

(I stand by everything I wrote there, read that post too!)

But this is a post about how to juggle reading a lot of books at once and follow multiple threads of interest without getting confused or anything ending up abandoned. It also doesn’t punish DNFing!

I use Beeminder for this system. I’ve written a bit about Beeminder before (here), and I truly believe it’s the best tool for the job: I’ve not found another system which will both nudge you about a daily habit while also being able to accumulate buffer in your goal. But if you want to adapt this to a different productivity tool of your choosing, please feel free (and I’d love to hear about it!)

First of all, identify the multiple strands of reading that you want to juggle. Perhaps you want to finish a long series, or read the entire bibliography of one particular author, or maybe you have a passion for self-improvement books, you’re trying to get through your physical tsundoku pile of accumulated books, you have a bookclub to read books for, or all of the above. It’s probably better to start with just a couple of these strands and expand as you go, but I’m not your boss, if you want to go crazy from the beginning then go for it.

You’re going to make a Beeminder odometer goal for each of these reading areas.
Beeminder is a service that holds you accountable for meeting your commitments in any area by charging you real money if you derail on your goals. For the purposes of this usage, the money factor is much less important than the fact Beeminder is an easy way to keep on track of many different goals at once, and get reminded of what progress needs to made on all of them daily. But because of the real money aspect, you need to start with a page goal that is realistic/bordering on laughably easy. So as an example, if you think that reading 10 pages a day (in total, across all the books you might want to read) is realistic even on a bad day, and you have 5 different goals, set each one to just 2 pages a day. The page commitment does not need to be same for each goal! You can choose to want to make faster progress on one strand over another one, distribute your pages as you see fit.

Note: you will need a premium Beeminder account to be able to make odometer goals, but you only need a month subscription to set everything up and you get to keep the goals forever.

In my case: I currently have a goal for reading the works of the brilliant late crime author Aida Saki, one for the dark masterpieces of Kizuki Jin, one for reading the top 100 BL novels as voted for by Booklive members, one for reading books while listening to the audiobook (which my bookclub calls ‘novelsonicing’), and one for everything else. I also had one for reading the Flesh and Blood pirate timeslip series until I successfully caught up with all 25 volumes. You could have a goal for reading in each of your different languages, one for just library books, or one for philosophy, fantasy, or any other number of things. However, if your goal isnt a specific list (or pile) that you can go and reference, I would recommend assembling a loose TBR for each goal, to avoid decision vacillation when its time to pick a new book. Dump your list in a book-tracking app, or in Obsidian, a spreadsheet, or even just scrawled on a piece of paper. More on that in a bit.

So now once you’ve told Beeminder you want to read 2 pages (or whatever) a day of each of these strands, you pick your book and read, and then enter the page number that you finish at into the goal. This is where it’s important that the goal type is an odometer type (what we would call a milometer in British English): it means you can’t have multiple books on the go at once within one goal. When you check-in, you don’t report “I read 20 pages”, you report “I got up to page 20“ and the next day “I got up to page 30” or whatever, and it tracks 10 pages read between those two days. If you suddenly reported being at page 5 in an entirely different book, you would mess up the graph and derail, so you are committing to reading one book until you either finish or drop it, before you can pick another one, in each of your goals. For this reason, I recommend having a wildcard ‘everything else’ goal like I do, to fit in random reads that don’t come under any other umbrella.

So for me, this means I can have five books on the go at once. The idea is that in reality you won’t be reading a few pages from 5 books a day, you’ll get into a rhythm where you get comfortably ahead on a book, then the next day you’ll read from the goal (or couple of goals) that are closest to due, and so on. The system will settle into a rhythm of rotating pressure that doesn’t require simultaneous effort on everything at once, yet moves you forward at a rate you’ve already decided: with no hard decisions to be made. You can also accumulate buffer enough so that you have days off with no reading, if you’re not someone obsessed with streaks (couldn’t be me).

And once you’ve finished (or dropped) a book, you tare the graph back to 0 again so you can start tracking a new page count, and you roll right into the next book on the list next time Beeminder nudges you. Because you’ve given all these areas of reading a clear remit, you should have both an element of choice (you get to pick from a list), but also a defined boundary (there is a list). For my novelsonic goal, I know to go browse my audible library; for my BL novels goal I check the spreadsheet I made of all those books, etc. I find that this is the best happy medium to both tickle my brain’s desire for novelty while also maintaining the structure that means I get closer to finishing these long term reading goals. Of course, I also have my generic reading goal, which lets me be completely flexible and pick up whatever hot new thing people are talking about, or else I usually pick something from my bookmeter TBR.1

In short, the odometer method means that you’re discouraged from endless samplings of the first ten pages of a million books, which is a habit I fell into a lot before I had this system. It keeps you streamlined on a few specific titles, but it also lets you drop things without consequence if you decide they really suck. It frees you from the “I might pick this up again… some day” graveyard, because Beeminder is breathing down your neck to make progress. And the thing is: finishing books is REALLY fun! Once you start doing it, it becomes very addictive, and you will feel really proud of yourself!

Once you’ve got the hang of the system and worked out your real-life limits, you can make a meta goal (the Beeminder folks call this ‘calendialing’) for scheduling breaks or lower-page requirement times in your goals. You can look ahead at what’s going on in the next few weeks: maybe a readathon will mean you’ll get ahead of your goals, or maybe a hospital stay or wedding will make it hard to read as much as usual, so you need some flat no-commitment spots in your graphs. This way the system adapts to your real life: it requires the effort from you that you promised, but that doesn’t mean that effort has to be the same every week. And its a good idea when you’re calendialing, to spend some time reflecting on which of your reading goals had friction in the last couple of weeks: are there goals that need to change, or be ditched entirely? Everything is just an experiment and all these feelings are just data. The key is to work with the actual self that you are, not a fictional well-read version of yourself that is impossible to sustain. You can make any changes to this system you want, with the caveat of requiring a week’s notice, because otherwise it’s very easy to wheedle out of goals that are important to us just because of a low motivation day.

At this point you can also choose to get even more granular. I’m considering making a reading goal specifically just for reading books about the yakuza. Or autobiographies by pro wrestlers (I have accumulated a weird amount of these). The goals don’t have to last forever, but it could be something cool to add to the rotation if I have the capacity. I had one for reading the 2026 Honya Award nominations but I ditched it after one book because I wasn’t feeling it.

Does this all feel like a level of micro-managing that is insane, instead of on the right side of eccentric genius? Perhaps, in which case you may not be the target demographic for this system. Maybe you just pick the next book from your bedside table and don’t think about graphs once ever when you’re reading. But I know that this works very well for my brain and enables me to read like an absolute demon, knocking my reading goals out of the park, while also respecting the reality of my chronic illness and fluctuating energy.

Anyhow, if you’ve done all that and created this elaborate system of smoothly rotating cogs that keeps your reading life moving inexorably forwards, you might start thinking about what other areas of your life you could streamline in the same way...

I sewed myself a new set of underwear recently. In a satisfying kind of spring ritual, I laid out some fabric I’d been gifted for my birthday in October, but hadn’t been well enough to do anything with until now. I took new measurements, spread out my pins and seam-ripper, ran a duster over my sewing machine, and loaded my pdf pattern into Adobe Acrobat to print.

There was an unfamiliar icon on the toolbar. I hovered over it: “Would you like to hear this document as an AI-generated podcast?” I froze for a second as I contemplated the implication of that offer. I admit my first reaction was just a sense of absurdity. A part of me wondered, amused, what a podcast about my knickers pattern would sound like. A pair of hosts bantering over the gusset. A guest speaker weighing in on the controversies about waistband elastic. Then it kind of sank in: is this how the world is operating now? The thought rattled around my head uncomfortably as I sewed my first seam: conversations between people who don’t exist, explaining things you can’t be bothered to read yourself.

Today, I open another pdf, a philosophy book I’d been reading, and there’s a pop-up at the bottom of the screen. “Simplify this document?” it asks. You can click to remove the pop-up for this session only, but it’ll be back next time you open the application. It reminds me of an ad I saw earlier on Instagram for yet another app that summarises great books so you don’t have to read them yourself. Outsource your thoughts and opinions, never read anything yourself: why would you need to? After all, we’re all stressed and busy and neurodivergent1, right?

I did some writing work for a volunteer project recently: researching and producing blurbs on the local history of nearby towns. I pored over the websites of cathedrals, museums, historical societies and census data, and even snooped on obscure Facebook groups where residents of tiny villages argued about the details of shipwrecks from the 1500s. I collated the info, double-checked sources, and then formed it into writeups of the more intriguing things I had learnt: stuff that I thought most people might not know, deep dive details. It was a lot of fun doing the work and seeing it all come together, and I learnt a lot in the process, too- about fascinating places that are on my doorstep and I never realised.

The manager of the project called me to discuss: she liked my writing a lot, and was extremely complimentary about what I’d come up with so far. But she had a deadline, far sooner than I was going to be able to manage on my own, and I expressed that worry. That’s fine, she said: whatever I can’t finish in time, she would get AI to write. “That’s the way the world is now,” she told me, after a painful silence, presumably seeing the look on my face. “I used to be a perfectionist like you, but I had to grow up.”

The next day, after letting the dust settle a little, I open my emails to draft an anxious epistle regarding my concerns. Outlook offers to summarise my inbox emails, and then suggests it formulate a response for me too. Don’t make human contact yourself, thinking about the words you say, the way you come across: it’s easier to have that work done for you.

Everywhere I look lately: summarise, outsource, paraphrase. Don’t linger with the text, don’t feel uncomfortable, don’t hold contradictory ideas. Don’t use your own judgement and don’t trust yourself that you’re capable of working things out if you sit with them. Attention= inefficiency.

I suppose I always thought that anti-intellectualism manifested as a suspicion of books, of studying, of experts- but then lately I can’t help but notice a more insidious guise it takes; that of intellectual posturing on social media. People recommending books that it transpires they haven’t read, suggesting study plans they haven’t tried, speaking authoritatively about things they have no first-hand experience of. Everyone’s a content creator and no one is a do-er. Lots of people very reluctant to make mistakes, so it’s much easier to not do anything, just produce the aesthetic of doing, right? And I get it. Doing is humbling, it’s hard, it makes you vulnerable.

It might be ugly to say so outright, but it’s true: not reading makes you stupider. Not in a moralistic way, but literally: every time you pass over an opportunity to wrestle with an idea, every time you outsource your thinking to an AI chatbot, you are risking neural, linguistic, and behavioural consequences. Frequent AI bot use is linked to increased struggles in independent reasoning and a lack of reflective thinking.

What’s more, if you don’t read books or news or even pdfs yourself, and rely on summaries, you don’t know how your perceptions are being conveniently manipulated. AI has bias, and if Grok’s MechaHitler incident (where Elon Musk’s chatbot churned out antisemitic content) wasn’t enough to make that clear, I’m not sure what to tell you. The biggest act of political resistance you have at your fingertips is to change your relationship with reading (and writing) today: by stopping giving opinions on things you haven’t read, slowing down, and actually reading them yourself. It might sound silly to say that writing your own work emails is political praxis, but the right to be understood in your own words is a crucial one that we shouldn’t be ceding so easily.

Maybe more importantly than all of that: if you don’t read or witness things yourself firsthand, you are short-changing yourself on a fundamental level. You’re robbing yourself of the joys of being touched by a story in the original words, of nodding along enthusiastically or vehemently disagreeing with philosophical thinkers of the past, of musing on something complicated and thinking it through yourself. When you read- whether it’s novels, plays, poetry or non-fiction- you are reaching out through time and space to make a human connection with someone who may have lived separated from you by hundreds of years and thousands of miles: and by writing, you have the chance to be part of that great conversation, too. Don’t let a robot steal that beautiful opportunity.

From epic pirate adventure to insightful self help, via yakuza depravity, detective fiction, and animal-eared ikemen. Here’s the stuff that stuck with me the most!

超雑談力

雑談の目的とは、ずばり「人間関係の構築」にあります。

(The goal of small talk, loosely, is “building human connection”)

I started a volunteer job working with the public in spring of this year, which was not a natural fit for me. There’s a chance that you’re reading this and you’re a sort of effortless extrovert, who rarely faces awkward silences, who hits it off equally as well with new coworkers as strangers at the bus stop. You have an arsenal of inoffensive small talk topics, and can swim in and out of social situations with affability and ease.

If you’re that kind of person, I envy and admire you, and this particular book might not be very useful for you.

However, if you’re an awkward oddball, in a way that sometimes causes friction with the outside world, as I am, then you may find this an invaluable read.

超雑談力 promises that with this slim volume only, you can become an elite master at small talk. The graphic inside the front cover is worth the cover price alone, with a cheat sheet for various conversation openers and techniques to try. It also covers useful topics like how to be a better anecdote-teller, and how to deal tactfully with refusing invitations. I initially thought that perhaps it might be specific to the peculiarities of Japanese language or culture: but was delighted to find that almost all the advice was incredibly useful. Great bang for your buck, and probably the most actionable book I read all year.

The FLESH & BLOOD series

Getting up to date with this series was my big reading project of this year, and I nearly managed it: I read 22 volumes of Flesh & Blood in 2025 (this blows my mind: the nautical jargon made volume 1 such a challenging read that it took me nearly a year to get through it). When i started it last year, the series captivated me so much right from the beginning that I embarked on a pilgrimage to retrace the protagonist’s footsteps— and I’m delighted that the story only got more engaging and thrilling as the books continued.

Flesh & Blood is the story of a Japanese schoolboy sucked into a timeslip into 16th century Europe, where he finds himself brushing elbows with figures he’s only read about in the history books. But that doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of this epic swashbuckling journey: in F&B you will find heart-crushing yearning, desolate tragedy, heroic rescue, thought-provoking musing on the nature of war and patriotism, and LOVE— paternal, fraternal, and of course, romantic. I feel so grateful to have found this series, and I’m excited that I still have the final volume and the spin-off short story collections left!

書く瞑想

I wrote about this one at much greater length in a blog post of its own, so I won’t retread too much of that ground: but this is a book about getting your shit together through the medium of a daily journalling practice. If you’re stuck in a toxic doom-scrolling loop; if you crave to live your life more intentionally— then this technique might be useful for you. I cover the method in English in the post, so check it out even if you don’t read Japanese.

サイメシスの迷宮 完璧な死体

忘れられる幸せ。忘却がもたらす平穏。

一体どれくらいの人が、その恵みに気づいているのだろう？

俺だって気づいていなかった。あの人に出会うまでは。

(The bliss of being forgotten.

The peace that comes from forgetting.

How many people are even aware of this blessing?

I hadn’t even realised it myself. Until I met that person...)

I read a lot of Saki Aida’s books this year, after falling in love with her Deadlock series: this is one of her rare non-BL titles, part of a trilogy of traditional detective novels. Aida was a genuinely excellent crime novelist completely independent of being an outstanding BL author, and this juicy serial killer story is about as perfect a novel as it’s possible to be. サイメシスの迷宮 features an incredibly compelling lead detective duo dynamic: the surly, eccentric Habuki, who has a rare neurological disorder that gives him a photographic memory; and the rookie cop Kamio, who has to navigate Habuki’s eccentricities when he’s paired with him to solve the gruesome murder and mutilation of a young woman.

SO many twists and turns, a satisfying climax, and a shocking ending. I thoroughly recommend.

デコイ 囮鳥 + デコイ 迷鳥

It would be easy to cram this list full of Aida-sensei’s books, but I’ll settle for just adding one more: okay, well, a pair actually. These are BL, so expect man-on-man action, although the “L” might be a misnomer in this instance.

When push comes to shove, which would you choose: the comforting embrace of the familiar, or the cold truth of justice?

A man awakes, lying in the rain on the ground at the bottom of a set of stone steps. He has no memory of who he is, or how he got there; and most unnervingly, he has a gun in his hand. What follows is the foggy, dreamlike quest for the man to regain his memories and uncover what got him to this point. A handsome stranger in a trenchcoat claims to know him, but can his version of events be trusted?

Nothing is as it seems in these two デコイ novels about the seedy yakuza underworld: they have such a hypnotic pace of revelation and mystery, that I was rapt until the final page. The themes of twisted, misguided devotion, and the soft comfort of captivity vs the harsh brutality of the truth: chef’s kiss.

ムカデ

Jin Kizuki was a new author I discovered only this year, and I’ve become obsessed with her very quickly. On the whole, she writes nasty, gritty, violent BL: full of blood and viscera and deliciously terrible toxic interdependent relationships. But I feel like that doesn’t give the full picture: she’s also hilariously funny, and her characters— even the irredeemable ones— are three dimensional and often marvellously lovable. She’s an immensely skilled writer who uses her powers for evil, and I respect that.

ムカデ is a punchy and disturbing short story about a surgeon called Takayuki, whose wife has just left him, and who has felt misunderstood and unfulfilled and like he’s a disappointment to everyone around him for his entire life. Then a chance encounter leads him to meet Minoru— an attractive young man half his age— on a zebra crossing. What follows is a nausea-inducing descent into madness. Mukade is a story that’s hurtling towards tragedy right from the first line, and you’re powerless to do anything but watch it unfold with increasingly impotent horror.

Kizuki-sensei is an author who will never coyly hint at something when she could give the lurid details, leaving nothing to the imagination. This short story would be a great litmus test for both if you enjoy her writing, and if you can tolerate the kind of themes she likes to tackle. If you do, then I would wholeheartedly recommend her 獣 series, about Ren, a punk kid who gets kidnapped by the yakuza, and his monstrous handler Kudou.

Honey Vibes

I am sooo picky about otome games. I’ve basically come to terms with the fact that I’m not the target demographic for most otome games, because I almost always seem to find them unsatisfying, even the ones which are critically acclaimed or adored by my friends. But my fetish for ケモ耳 outweighed the more sensible part of me telling me I shouldn’t pre-order a new otome game, and this time it paid off, in the form of Honey Vibes.

Honey Vibes is an Otomate VN about an animal-loving girl who gets isekaied to the kingdom of beastmen. There, she discovers their strange customs, chequered history, and a potentially world-ending prophesy...

This game scratched an itch for me and I enjoyed it a lot. It was very sexy, a lot sexier than I expected from a switch game, and the tension genuinely felt electric. Kimura Ryouhei was effortlessly charming as the black territory king, Elijah; and Okamoto Nobuhiko’s seductively growly performance as the arrogant red king Milo was equally as captivating. The big overarching plot and global-scale drama was of secondary interest to the interpersonal relationships between the player character and the boys: but those relationships were so well done that it didn’t matter. Overall, a glorious escapist fantasy, with beautiful artwork and sultry summer holiday vibes.

lesson

By far the single most memorable thing I read this year, this short visual novel by Parade still sticks in my throat and makes my stomach churn months after finishing it. I almost didn’t include this one, because it’s so hard to find the words to describe the emotional journey it sent me on.

It’s appropriate that lesson starts with a car crash. A year after being released from a juvenile detention centre, Kento is injured in a motorbike accident. The driver who he hit— Yoshino— visits him in hospital: although surly-faced, he’s strangely attentive and thoughtful, buying him lots of things to make his arduous hospital recovery easier, from paper underwear and an electric toothbrush to audiobook subscriptions. When Kento is ready to be discharged, it seems like the natural choice to accept Yoshino’s offer to stay at his place while he rehabilitates his injuries.

Yoshino is a teacher, and has a naturally patient and calm demeanour as he cares for the pugnacious and borderline-feral Kento. Something, quite inevitably, begins to bloom between them... but not all is as it seems.

This a VN that leads you by the hand down one narrative, before hitting you with a revelation that knocks the air out of your lungs and recontextualises everything. I would recommend if you like having your feelings hurt!

ぷり・プリ～PRINCE×PRINCE～

Finishing with a visual novel that has an entirely different vibe, I stumbled across this 2005 BLVN by chance and was seduced by the fact Junichi Suwabe voiced one of the routes.

The young prince Kurt is sent on a year’s diplomatic mission to visit the nearby kingdoms to make positive relationships with their princes. It just so happens that all of those princes (and their retainers, and their dads...) are swoon-worthily handsome…

ぷり・プリ～PRINCE×PRINCE～was such a sweet nostalgia-fest, it felt like a warm hug of an experience. It features a very young Kaji Yuuki as the endearing airhead protagonist Kurt, and it’s also not difficult Japanese-wise, so I can recommend it to less experienced learners. A couple of the bad endings get a bit edgy, but overall a really comforting read.

来年

Next year I want to continue reading the bibliographies of Saki Aida and Kizuki Jin, while also trying to diversify my reading a bit to some more mainstream contemporary Japanese lit: Ryo11 in the 別次元の図書館 bookclub brought up the idea of reading the 2026 本屋大賞 nominated books and making our own server best-of ranking. I’ll be joining in with that: feel free to join us!

I’m not sure what’s going to fill the gap left by Flesh & Blood yet, but I’d definitely like to find the time for more VNs in 2026 too: I’m going to try to embrace the energy that I’ve had with novels this year, and only make time for the stuff I’m really loving. No more random 60-hour meh otome games!

I hope you’ve had a great year, and that you’ve read at least one thing that altered your brain chemistry a bit in 2025. お疲れ様です!

It’s been a year since I started using the Beeminder website daily to support my goals, and I can safely vouch for the fact it works (with the caveat that maybe you have to be a slightly intense data-obsessed hyper-nerd). In the last year it has helped me read over 80 books in Japanese, do 60 hours worth of focused revision for the JLPT exam in July, complete over 50 workouts, finish many sewing projects, keep my flat clean, and even empty my dreaded PC downloads folder. As a feckless layabout with a tendency to follow the path of least resistance, this has been enormous. So I figured it was finally time to go public about my enthusiasm for this slightly niche tool, and explain a bit about how it’s helped me specifically.

what is beeminder?

Beeminder is a website where you make a pledge that you’re going to do what you say you’re going to do: it can be a tiny amount of money, like $5, but the money is essential to the method.

First of all, you map your goal to a daily amount of progress that needs to be made towards it to be successful: Beeminder then creates a graph for you. If your goal is something like read 20 pages a day, then that’s easy: you have to log 20 pages read by the end of each day to keep yourself on the right side of the red line. If you read more than 20 pages, you accumulate buffer. Something like 50 workouts a year is a bit trickier; 0.137 workouts a day. How does that work? In practice, your graph will turn red to indicate “one workout due” roughly once a week, and then after you’ve logged that workout, you’ll have buffer til the next week. But breaking things into quantifiable units per day is always the first step. And if you dip below the wrong side of the red line at any point, you derail, and you owe Beeminder $5 (or however much).

isn’t that kind of miserable? paying for failing?

I can understand where this is coming from, and I think it’s a mindset thing. In reality, its a way of reminding myself about what’s important every day— or at least, what my past self thought was important— and the little sting of the small fee adds a weight of consequence so that I can’t throw out my past plans on the tiniest whim. The fact that you edit your goal only on a one-week delay means that you have to consider what the You Of A Week Ago wanted.

That’s been my problem with lots of other approaches to goals: the Me of Today wants to throw out my plans for JLPT study or tidying the flat, to eat ice cream and listen to drama CDs. And once one day’s worth of contract with myself has been broken, it’s easy to slip back into NEVER getting back on the wagon. However, if I make the choice with Beeminder one day that ice cream trumps study, then I choose to pay the fee and derail, but I’ll be back on the chopping block in another week, so I don’t forget what I promised myself.

The staff at Beeminder are also incredibly fair and human. When I got Covid last December, only a few weeks into using Beeminder, and suddenly became too ill to achieve my goals, I emailed them: they didn’t charge me for my derails, and scheduled breaks on my goals that I said I wouldnt be able to achieve while I was ill.

Using a system with a financial sting also makes you think “What is this goal worth to me? What would I pay someone to make sure I kept on track with it?” I did 42 workouts (Fit Boxing on the Switch) on schedule this year before I slipped up and derailed. I was frustrated to pay the $5, but then I thought: I did 42 sessions I wouldn’t have done otherwise: and got back on the saddle immediately (after a small respite period which comes with derailing). What kind of personal trainer can you get for that rate?

Note: I’ve since retired Beeminder for workout goals, after starting to work with an occupational therapist in the summer for my ME/CFS and being advised that exercise is not the best plan for me right now, but my use of Beeminder has evolved since, and it is no less helpful! 

how did i start?

It started with MDZS.

I wanted to read the legendary danmei novel 魔道祖師 in Japanese translation, but it was fiendishly difficult: full of complicated Chinese idioms, confusing action, Xianxia vocab— and every character had at least three different names. I was determined to get through it, to not quit: but I was dreading picking it up. It was way too easy to choose something else to read instead.

When it had been a full fortnight that I’d been ignoring the book that I was telling people I so desperately wanted to read, I realised that my attention span was broken. I will always choose the easiest way out. Every time I overrode my screen time settings to just let myself have 10 more minutes on Instagram, I eroded my sense of self-respect. I wasn’t a boss I could have faith in. So I needed to outsource this.

Why not an accountability buddy? Unfortunately, my friends are too kind to me, and I knew they would probably listen and nod sagely to my whiny excuses as to why I couldn’t pick up MDZS that particular night... until they would gradually stop checking. I needed a cold hard measurestick that didn’t care about me.

That’s when I found Beeminder. And over the next arduous month, I turned up dutifully whenever the graph turned red. I read my pages. I finished the book. It’s safe to say, since then, Beeminder has become one of my most valuable allies.

what are my specific goals?

Right now I’m using Beeminder mostly for reading. I have goals for number of books read, as well as my progress through various authors’ back catalogues, and the Flesh and Blood series (it blows my mind that I’ve managed to read 23 volumes of this series, heavy as it is with its nautical lingo: but oh my god I’m so glad i did!). I also have a goal for time spent reading visual novels: over 200 hours so far this year. I also continue to make short-term goals to get me through difficult books, like currently with Guin Saga.

Having successfully studied for and PASSED the highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test in July (YAY!), I happily retired my study hours and Anki goals, but I’m planning on starting a new study goal for Latin in the new year.

One of my favourite niche use-cases was when I used Beeminder earlier this year to help me sell my unwanted books on eBay and save up enough for a Steam Deck: I had a goal to do “one eBay action per day” (like taking photographs, revising listings, etc) and that helped me break down a very boring job I’d been putting off for months into manageable sessions.

I have a goal to clear out my PC hard drive, which gets horrifyingly cluttered without intervention, one for checking my budget app, and for remembering to make digital backups: that little nudge is all I need to remind me to take care of these tedious tasks, and feel like a proper grownup who is On Top Of Things. I have a goal for focused minutes using the Forest app, and one for writing in my journal. I also have whittle-down goals for getting through my backlog of unread Kindle books (if I buy more than I read, I derail), and my drama CD collection.

You’re welcome to snoop on my goals here!

unexpected benefits

One thing I didn’t predict about Beeminder’s usefulness was something that actually occurs before you’ve made any progress towards your goal: it helps you pick a good goal in the first place. Having to put a number on the thing you want to achieve means you have to face the cold hard reality of what you’re asking from yourself, in terms of quantifiable steps towards that goal every single day. It’s easy to make large vague promises in the heady New Year’s haze; but are you willing to do what it takes to get there, when you imagine that goal glaring redly at you?

Sometimes, this has made me realise that I don’t actually want the things that I thought I did (yeah, writing three essays in Japanese every week was a cool idea, but...); other times it’s made me Beemind them at a much shallower slope than I originally planned. Either way, it’s been a valuable self-reflection tool.

in conclusion

One of the things I love about Beeminder is that it doesn’t feel corporate or overly slick. I don’t get the impression the folks there are trying to manipulate me, they’re just a bunch of nerds who wanted to solve their own problems, and in doing so they created a tool that other people can use too. It does what it says it does , with no fluff or extras. They’re happy to admit when a competitor does something better, which allows them to focus on just doing what they do as well as possible.

And that’s the final message: Beeminder is for nerds. If you’re excited by the idea of creating a spreadsheet for your goals, then you’re the target demographic. It doesn’t claim to be able to fix your problems for you, but it does provide a framework within which you can find your own solutions. If it’s measurable, its Beeminderable: from the tiny micro tasks to the big important stuff (people on the Beeminder forums have Beeminded everything: from brushing their teeth to finding a spouse). It doesn’t replace doing the work, but it gets the work done.

Over in the 別次元の図書館 discord bookclub, we’re having a goals planning party! Next weekend (Saturday 22nd November 10pm GMT) we will be having a live event to discuss our goals (language learning or otherwise), get advice, share ideas, and cheer each other on. You can join in with video, mic only, or just in the text chat. Japanese learners of any level are all welcome!

We’ve recently had a reshuffle in the 別次元 discord, changing the focus from our bimonthly bookclubs to being a space for discussing reading in Japanese in general; and our community reading projects, such as the giant book bingo board we’ve been working on this year. Look at this thing! It’s crazy! (Not too late to help us fill in our final squares…!)

One of the things that came up while restructuring the discord was the desire for an accountability space, where we could share what we’re working on together; whether that’s work, study, chores, exercise, or of course- reading! So now we have a goals text channel, where anyone can share their longterm goals or their daily to-do lists. We also have a voice channel, the 閲覧室, where you can pop in anytime (muted) for extra accountability if you need it. It’s nice to know people all around the world are working on their goals!

And of course, all the best ideas from the goals planning party workshop next weekend will be rounded up in the goals channel after the fact, so don’t worry if you can’t make it.

Whether you’re joining us or not, I’ve also made some graphics to hopefully help with brainstorming your goals. Perhaps the prompts can get you thinking about what you want out of 2026! They are also available as a pdf, here.

2025 has been a year with a lot of tricky readjustments for me and my goals, as my chronic health conditions have worsened, I’ve had to re-evaluate what’s possible. So when I’m planning the goals and habits I want to prioritise next year, I’m personally going to be working extra hard to meet me at the Today Self, and not a version of myself I wish could exist. Maybe you feel the same! Either way, I’m cheering you on; and looking forward to seeing some of you next weekend!

"Ready " is a moving goalpost that will magically shrink further and further away the longer you wait, so you may as well hurtle towards what you want to do now.

what do you WANT to be doing?

I saw a tumblr post a while ago where someone who wanted to get into sewing clothes was asking advice of a more experienced seamstress— “is lingerie a totally absurd place to start?” I was pleased to see the reply was an emphatic no. Tumblr user fourpatch replied “making things you want to wear is more motivating than making things according to somebody else’s schema of some ideal learning order.” She went on to elaborate on the marvellous skills you will learn through lingerie making: applying elastic, sewing complex shapes, managing seam allowance etc. Even if the learning curve is a little steep, you will, after all, only learn the skills required for sewing lingerie by jumping in and sewing that lingerie.

As both an amateur sewist and a language learner, the parallels jumped out at me immediately. When I learned to machine sew, there was a lot of advice that you should start with like, a pillow case or a book cover, and not leap into dressmaking immediately. But I didn’t want a pillow case. And I did really want a dress. So I sewed a dress, with a lot of help from YouTube, and it was kinda wonky and the seams were a bit crappy and the pockets were uneven but I could WEAR IT, and more importantly, my love for sewing and my confidence for solving my own problems were sky high. (Nowadays I make all of my own clothes).

Equally, there’s a lot of advice in language learning that you shouldn’t do X before you do Y: you should do a textbook first; you should read graded readers before you think about playing a video game; you should be able to order coffee before you start a novel. But what if you don’t want a coffee? (Or a pillow case?) There isn’t a one-size-fits-all curriculum of language learning, as much as courses and apps have vested interest in us believing this.

If you want to learn Japanese to play videogames (like I did: as you might have guessed from my blog title, the Ryu Ga Gotoku games were my primary, burning motivation), you'll find all the vocab and grammar that you need to understand those games in those games. Words like チンピラ、ケツ持ち, and マル暴 aren't gonna be in any JLPT textbook. You could spend thousands of hours studying Japanese academically and still be totally ill-prepared to jump into Kamurocho with Kiryu— or to explore Eorzea, or woo the samurai boys of Ken Ga Kimi.

"but the thing I want to do is too hard!"

First of all, everything is hard. You're picking your flavour of hard. It's hard to grind vocab out of context for years on end and not get closer to what you wanna be doing. It's hard to face the reality of staying bad at Japanese. And it's hard (but maybe not as hard as you think) to take the plunge and touch your goal. Just touch it! Just put it in your eyes and ears. Which would you rather choose? The pain of the familiar or the pain of the unknown?

Second rebuttal: anything that feels too hard is actually just too big. You need to make the steps smaller, teeny-tiny, forkful-sized. This is why I love sentence mining, because you're breaking down the language into the smallest possible (still-useful) division: the humble sentence. Sure, you might launch up RGG and be baffled and overwhelmed by the myriad menus and the infernal mumbling of the senior clan members, but as long as you know です you can find an i+1 sentence (a sentence with only one unknown word) and then another one, and another one. In this way, your knowledge snowballs, and you're certain that you're heading in the right direction, because all of your learning is taking directly from the thing. THE thing, the thing that made you want to learn Japanese.

If the novel you want to read is too hard, can you manage just a sentence a day? How would that feel? (this tip courtesy of this excellent post from ) Are you even sure it definitely IS too hard, or is that just a story you've been telling yourself? And if it IS too painful to make progress on right now, that also is useful data. What's the problem? Do you need to study some grammar? Do you need a primer on Kansai-ben? Do you need wider kanji knowledge? The text itself will hold the answers to guide your next action.

It’s also fine to skim! To skip around! To take what you can at this time and come back later. Just by launching the game or by reading the first page, you’ve broken the spell around The Thing, and it’ll be much easier to tackle next time.

Of course, you can also ease in by doing adjacent things: in the case of RGG, you could start out by sentence mining the 極主夫道 anime, or reading a slice-of-lifey yakuza/cop BL manga, or binging Kiryu/Majima doujin— but whatever it is, it has to be IN JAPANESE (reading about the yakuza in English does NOT get you closer to your goal).

building resilience

This is another enormous benefit of starting before you’re ready. Say you wanted to learn Japanese to enjoy the works of Haruki Murakami in the original language (not my jam, but a type of person that surely exists). The longer you wait before actually jumping in and reading a Murakami book, you risk two things:

a) It not being as good as you hoped. As long as you stay coy, it remains perfect, theoretically, in your mind; and you're likely to build it up and put it on a pedestal. When the thing you learnt Japanese for turns out decisively average, how are you going to manage your disappointment? Meanwhile, the person who leapt in before they were ready has already read fifty books in this time (perhaps sloppily, imperfectly), and found new authors they like, discovered new things to enjoy, and no longer is nailing all of their expectations on one thing.

You also risk b) it still being hard, even incomprehensible, after all this time. You're going to wrestle with self doubt: why am i still struggling, after I put in so much work? Am I stupid? Is there something wrong with me? The sooner you get used to confronting things that you find hard, the better. The more you fail, the stronger you get, and the more robust your ego grows. I had over 11k anki cards and 100 novels under my belt when I opened サイメシスの迷宮, where I didn't understand the grammar of literally the first sentence. This happens less and less but it still happens! But all of my experience of trying and failing and getting comfortable with things being hard has meant that I viewed it as an exciting chance to learn something new, rather than any damning indictment on my own intellect. You can’t possibly know something you haven’t had a chance to know yet. So give yourself lots of chances.

There is also a third problem. You risk losing motivation way before you even get to that point. Say the piratical appeal of Luffy and co made you fall in love with the Japanese language, but you told yourself “I have to finish Genki before I can read One Piece”. Sure, there may be a variety of person for whom that is such an intensely exciting thought that they blast through Genki with joy, but the far more common type of person will find the textbook learning so intensely boring (and hard, because you’re learning concepts that aren’t anchored to anything relevant to you), that it will sap their energy and make them dread the activity of “studying Japanese”. Compare to the person who opens the One Piece manga as soon as they’ve learnt kana— who learns from the very first page that some people use 俺 instead of 私, and who uses the desire to comprehend the manga to urge them forward. The spark that got you started can become the fuel for the journey: at every stage.

be true to yourself

It’s okay if the thing that you care about is weird, unconventional, or trashy. It’s okay to be authentic and pursue that thing. It’s also fine if people on the internet think it’s too hard for you. There will always be haters telling you that you can’t possibly sew a dress if you haven’t made a pillow case, and you don’t have any obligation to listen to them. Your only job is to enjoy what you’re doing.

You don’t have to follow someone else’s schema: whether that’s whatever popular Anki Core deck, or a textbook— or even random immersion things that aren't fun to you, just because you've been told "it's a good first (whatever)". Do you really love Yotsuba, or is it just something you’re trying to read because someone said that shounen is too hard for beginners? Think carefully. It's fine if you love Yotsuba, it's just that if something bores you, you are actively less likely to learn anything useful.

If you take the plunge into what you WANT to be doing in the language sooner, sure, you may do it imperfectly. In fact you may do it extremely badly. But it’s only going to get easier. So sew that dress. Read that book. Play that videogame. Employ the tools you have at your disposal to make it easier. Have a go, at least. What harm can it do?

Recently I completed Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones in Japanese. It was a nostalgia-rich experience, fondly revisiting a classic strategy game I had enjoyed in my teens: engaging with thought-provoking puzzles and a cast of lovable characters. I had stalled on it for almost a year, and when I got back to it, I realised I only had about a quarter of the game left: it took me six hours to finish it. This number is significant, because when I finally reached a breaking point with my phone usage earlier this year, it was after a week where my average screentime had surpassed six hours per day. I could have finished Sacred Stones seven times that week. Instead: what did I do? Nothing worth remembering, for sure.

Problematic phone usage has been preying on my mind for a number of years, but I feel like this past six months has brought the problem into sharp relief: the news cycle is more shocking than ever, and social media even more aggressive and relentless. The friends' posts that we joined instagram or twitter for are now bobbing around helplessly in a sea of effluent AI slop, outrageous misinformation, and purposefully provocative rage bait. "Brain rot" was Oxford Word of the Year for 2024, referring to the lethargic cognitive decline characterised by over-consumption of low-value online content. In an insidious system optimised to manipulate our desires, it's very hard to break the cycle. I'm on my own journey to use my phone less– it's a work-in-progress, I don't claim to have all the answers, and I'm not here to preach– but I wanted to put some thoughts out there in two main categories: why succumbing to the compulsion of endless scrolling is so dangerous, and what can be done about it.

problems

choices/control

Would you like the choices about your life to be made by the worst person you know? It's a galling reality that by mindlessly scrolling social media, we are giving the reins of what we put in our brain to unpleasant tech billionaires with a vested interest in keeping us addicted at any cost. Sometimes there is the illusion of curation, but algorithms are constantly manipulating what we see, feeding us content intended to provoke and stupefy. There are enormous departments of people paid dizzying salaries to create systems more addictive than the most famous casinos. Unfortunately, we can't make institutional change to these systems, apart from by talking about it: but we can make changes in our own lives. Attention is the most valuable currency we have. However you spend it, don't you want to be the one who chooses?

time

Imagine that some sort of wish-granting genie visited you and bestowed upon you an unusual boon: henceforth, you will be allowed an extra hour a day. Yes, from now on, you will have 25 hours every day. Wouldn't that be a wonderful gift? How would you spend that extra hour? Yet, studies say that Gen Z Americans are spending an average of nearly 6 and a half hours a day on their phone, with Millennials not much better at 5 and a half. Surely it would be possible to claw back just an hour of that, and be our own wish-granting genie?

We are wasting SO many hours that we could be using differently. Not even "productively", just "purposefully". Spend that time on video games or watching films, if you want! But you could also fit in so much more time with loved ones, study, reading, exercise, time in nature, etc. It goes back to the previous point: all that matters is that you made the choice yourself about how to spend your hours. My imperfect phone-use reduction strategies have already enabled me to read 30 novels in Japanese this year, as well as devote time to studying for the JLPT and sewing myself a new wardrobe.

For some useful (albeit alarming) quick maths, check out this graphic from The Guardian's Reclaim Your Brain newsletter, conveniently presented in phone wallpaper format.

cognitive and emotional impacts

By consuming an endless feed of algorithmically generated emotion-bait, we are actively doing damage to cognitive mechanisms in our brain, which destroys our concentration, manipulates our basest instincts (rage bait, thirst traps etc), and generally does intellectual harm. The cycle of slot-machine-esque endless scrolling leaves us craving stimulation, not wanting to be left alone with our feelings or thoughts for a second. Whether you want to call it meditation, or mindfulness, or just sitting-around-doing-nothing time, having moments alone with our thoughts is essential for mental consolidation, stress reduction, recharging and combating burnout.

Earlier this year I watched a presentation by neuroscientist TJ Power where he explained that the quickly accessible dopamine hits of short form video are actually making long-term achievement feel less rewarding neurologically, therefore killing our drive for hard (read: worthwhile) projects. He also talks in his book about how the rebound from being in this hyperstimulated state results in low mood and depression. A quick browse of /r/digitalminimalism results in many heartrenching stories from people whose phone use has become so problematic that they're even considering suicide.

solutions

I've had several confronting tussles with willpower in the throes of trying to recover from phone addiction. While intellectually knowing all of the above, and desperately wanting to try to improve the situation, the phone-checking compulsion had me installing blocking apps only to find myself googling ways to override them merely hours later, sick with self-loathing.

So firstly, things that didn't help: app-based solutions, or screentime restriction (I would just delete or override). A phone lockbox (didn't use it). Deleting apps and using the mobile browser based versions instead (I easily switched to sinking time into the suboptimal browser experience instead).

Here's what ended up actually working.

the podium

I started off the year with a firm rule that my phone wasn't allowed in my bedroom at all. This was a great start, although it felt unbearable in the beginning, and it eliminated some of the most problematic behaviours (late night maudlin instagram reels browsing, neurotically checking my phone first thing when my eyes snapped open in the morning). I then expanded that to no phone in the bathroom (I would watch youtube shorts until long after the bath water went cold), and then finally culminated to the current situation, which is The Podium. My phone now lives in a single position in my flat, on a bookshelf in my spare room. This means I have to visit my phone if I want to use it, rather than it being constantly in my pocket; and crucially, I have to use it standing up. I have important text notifications and calls sent through to my watch. For email, instagram DMs etc, I use my computer.

informal hierarchy of bed-based activities (no jokes please)

Removing my phone from my bedroom meant that I needed replacement activities to avoid instantly giving into my twitchy-fingered anxiousness and going to retrieve it. I'd love to say that I strictly use my bed for its intended purpose and have developed a monastic level of sleep hygiene now, but the reality is that I spend an awful lot of time in bed fatigued or in pain with chronic illness, and that was the biggest danger zone for mindless scrolling (of course, it ended up making me feel more tired and generally worse). So instead, I have a hierarchy of activities I can do in bed which go from higher energy/less pain to lower energy/more pain. It goes like this:

read kindle→ play DS→ listen to audiobook/drama cd→ SLEEP

Importantly, all of these things are disconnected from the internet, and they're all things that I've chosen I want to spend time on in advance. None of them are anywhere near as stimulating as a glowing rectangle of endless entertainment, and I find myself choosing sleep a lot more often.

alternatives on the go

Just like the bed thing, it's also important to have alternatives for when you're out and about: waiting for an appointment, on public transport, or just generally have time to kill. I keep a portable games console plus the current book I'm reading in my rucksack, and leave my phone at the bottom, under my cardigan. There's also an element of just learning to be comfortable with being bored for short periods of time.

A realisation I had on a sunny afternoon in a GP surgery car park recently helped me reframe things. I was waiting to meet someone, and I knew I wouldn't be sat there for much longer than ten minutes maximum. Of course, as soon as my bottom hit the bench, I felt the desire to rummage in my bag to get my phone out, to start scrolling. My rational mind hit in, reminding me of my goals, the promises I had made myself, so I stopped, and pulled out the book I had with me instead. The thing was: I had already finished the book earlier that day. I instantly thought "Well, I can't read this book again, I've already read it, I won't learn anything new from it." And then rapidly, a second thought: "But if I scroll instagram, would I learn anything new from THAT? Have I ever finished a public ten minute reels session feeling enriched and edified?"

I realised that both choices were actually equal in that sense. Neither were going to be adding anything new or valuable to my life. BUT if I flicked through the book I had already read, I knew that it would a) not aggravate me, and b) not contribute to the dopamine resistance that TJ Power talked about that triggers when you indulge in short-form video.

So I started reading the book again! Or I could have just sat there and done nothing; stared at the sky or the gravel, the true neutral option. Either way, it made me realise that it's not the end of the world to not be continuously stimulated. And this experience represented the reclaiming of choice, too. I chose to re-read the book, rather than going on instagram where someone else is making the choices about what I'm going to be shown.

maintaining social connections

I was lucky enough that when I said I was taking a break from instagram, a lot of my dear friends wanted to stay in touch elsewhere. Fear of losing these friends was an enormous factor in not taking the plunge of deleting the apps sooner: my main social group has been online since the pandemic. Happily, I was surprised that the slightly extra effort involved in messaging elsewhere has actually improved a lot of these relationships, and now in some cases I'm even looking forward to regular phone calls to catch up with these friends and set the world to rights, when previously our relationship wasn't much deeper than flame-emoji reacting to their stories. I can honestly say I feel far LESS lonely than I did when I was on instagram.

If this is a worry of yours too, then you're absolutely not alone. The first thing I would suggest is opening up conversations with the people you feel you would miss if you didnt talk to them anymore (even if it feels weird and intense at first), explaining that you want to be more intentional about phone use and that they're important enough to you that you'd like to make it work in a different medium: discord, email, text messages, etc. You might be surprised how many people are feeling exactly the same.

doing the science

If you still need a wakeup call to turbo-charge your willpower, you can always try doing a few calculations or experiments. First of all, take a frank look at your screentime and subtract the amount of that which feels essential (maps, podcasts, camera, texting your mum). Multiply the resulting number by 31, or 365, and see firsthand how much of your life you're losing per month or year to unintentional phone use. If you feel overwhelmed with a gnawing sense of dread in the pit of your stomach after doing this maths, well, me too: use it to fuel the change you know you're capable of.

Another thing is breaking the misconception that scrolling time is a treat, a reward for your breaks. Try setting a timer for ten minutes, and spending that time fully indulging in your poison of choice. Afterwards, take a note of how you feel. Is it rejuvenated, relaxed, and ready to get back to some deep work? I know I wasn't feeling that way. I was leaving these scrolling sessions feeling more frazzled, ambiguously uncomfortable, and frustrated. When I confronted that reality it was far easier for me to stick to my phone-free commitments.

closing thoughts

Originally, I was going to write here that I don't think that it's necessarily possible or even desirable to cut out all smartphone usage. But since starting to write this post, I read August Lamm's pamphlet You Don't Need A Smartphone, which I found so informative and convincing that now I'm starting to sympathise with the stance of going entirely smartphone-free.

Either way, the crux of the matter is who's in charge: you, or the phone. If you're starting to feel like it genuinely might be the phone: eg. you find yourself procrastinating things you know you want or have to do, you can't concentrate on anything for 5 minutes without feeling twitchy or anxious, and your phone is disrupting your sleep or human relationships... perhaps it's time to reevaluate. That was definitely the point I was at earlier this year; where instagram rapidly started to feel less like I was hanging out with my cool friends and more like I was taking microdoses of psychic damage from an evil warlock. But the balance is shifting, and now I finally feel like I'm the one steering the ship. I feel more relaxed and fulfilled, I get better rest, and I've found time for all sorts of more fulfilling projects. My online-only relationships are almost entirely intact, in some cases even becoming deeper by switching to a more intentional form of contact. And all of the evidence from the sources I've linked in this post point to optimistic outcomes for reversing the cognitive damage done by previous phone use.

Change is possible. Don't let the years pass you by. I'm rooting for you.

It’s a little over a year now since I first downloaded the note-taking “second brain” app Obsidian and my life changed for the better forever. I’ve settled into a workflow that works for me, so I thought I’d share a bit about how I’m using it, in case you’re looking for inspiration as to how to use Obsidian for keeping reading notes.

The most important thing to mention at the beginning is that the best system is one that evolves with you based on your needs— similarly to Anki, it’s easy to get bogged down in the beginning trying to get the perfect setup, but it’s much better to start super simple and then adapt as you go. Otherwise, you risk getting overwhelmed before you begin.

reading notes overview

I use Obsidian with a vertical monitor (I’m a vertical monitor evangelist for things like this: if you haven’t tried it, I would definitely recommend), so my usual everyday view looks a bit like this:

On the left, are the folders. When I’ve finished working on something, I’ll stash it away in the appropriate folder. While I’m still currently adding to a note, I’ll usually just keep it loose at the bottom of the list for quick access.

In the middle is the meat of the note. At the top, I can navigate between volumes in a series quickly by using the pink hyperlinks (you can link between any other note in your Obsidian vault just by using [[double square brackets]]), and an author index page I’ve made that links all the books I’ve read by that author. I also include a few stats: the date I finished, my reading speed (as measured by ttsu reader), how long the book was, and my star rating.

Then I have a fancy box— it’s called a callout— to put character names and a short description to jog my memory about them. If their name is in kanji I also put the reading.

After that, I have notes for each chapter or chunk of the book. I don’t always write something for every chapter, especially if I’m reading physically. I’ll often just write up my thoughts in one big batch after I’ve finished the book. But for bookclub picks, or favourite series, I like to be a bit more methodical.

I don’t have to write all this stuff out from scratch every time because I made a template that I can insert every time I start a new book. Of course, it’s best to find the format that works well for you, but if you’d like to use my reading notes template you can download it here (it needs to go in a templates folder in your Obsidian vault). When blank, it looks like this:

There’s also a bit at the bottom of my reading notes template designed to encourage me into Japanese output practice, but I don’t always use it. It just has a few writing prompts for after I’ve finished the book: what was my favourite scene; favourite character; favourite quote, then a space for extra notes.

You can choose what to use the right hand column for: you can customise it in a bunch of ways, using it to highlight dangling links, or even display a calendar, but I prefer to use it for a simple overview of the document I’m working on, organised by headers. This way I can quickly skip to the part of the note I need, and not have to scroll past all my yapping every time.

other things I do with obsidian

I also use Obsidian for— well, everything, actually: including drafting this post. At its core it’s a super lightweight, very powerful, delightful to use, local-based text editor. But what I’d like to highlight is how I use it for organising my reading in general, as well as goal-setting and noting progress towards those goals.

organising TBR lists

Here I’ve got a list I copied over from Learn Natively of top BL novels: I thought it would be a fun project to try to read all of these, and having the list in Obsidian means I can keep track of which I’ve read, and link to the relevant notes. I’ve also noted WHERE I own each book, to save me from having to search all my physical bookshelves before realising that I have it on Kindle.

tracking reading challenges

When I’m doing a specific reading challenge like Tadoku, I keep a note of my goals and progress as I go, logging daily updates.

This way I have a clear overview where I can see if my goals are reasonable. It also serves as a nice little diary after the fact, where I can check what I was reading at that specific point in time. I do little trackers like this for other challenges (or “self science experiments”) too, like when I went vegan for a month last September. I would note down what I ate, how I felt, and any realisations or ideas I’d had.

goals

This is something new I’m trying for 2025. At the start of the year, I organised all my goals into this note.

At the end of every month, I’m using the 2025 goals page as a template to update my progress towards each area.

Again, it lets me see really clearly whether I’m on track with what I want to be doing.

plugins

The essential plugins I use for my setup:

callout manager: Lets me customise the fancy boxes like the “characters” one on my reading notes page, with a choice of colours and icons. Sometimes I also make a “concepts” box too, for fantasy books like 魔道祖師 which have a lot of specific terms.

emoji magic: Easily add emojis to notes with a hotkey. Sometimes the only appropriate response to a part of a book is 👀 or 😳, you know?

highlightr: Highlight text in different colours. I use this for noting particularly eyebrow-raising quotes.

iconize: To put these cute icons in my folders list.

natural language dates: This one means you can just type @today or @yesterday and it will automatically change it to Thursday 20th February 2025, or any other date format you prefer. Save precious seconds not having to remember what day it is.

novel word count: See what an absurd amount of words you’ve spent writing about books right from the folder list.

style settings: Tweak your aesthetic themes, like the one I use, AnuPpuccin. This lets you customise the colours and other details in more detail.

As I mentioned at the start, the best system is one that evolves depending on your needs. Start before you’re ready, and then as you go, you’ll get ideas about what YOU want to be doing with Obsidian. Then you can google how to do it, and find what plugins you need!

why keep reading notes?

Perhaps this needs to be a post of its own, but maybe you’re reading this thinking “why would I need to keep notes like this anyway?” Here’s the reasons I do it:

to share with my bookclub: When reading things with the 別次元の図書館 crew, we share our takes as we read in Discord. I keep my notes in Obsidian and then copy them over at the end of each chapter. It’s always interesting seeing what other people noticed that I didn’t, or when people highlighted the exact same quotes that I did.

as a diary: Reading notes become a record of how I felt when I was reading a particular book, and what thoughts and ideas it brought up for me. Even when my notes are just what affectionately refers to as “Watching Fireworks” (i.e. copy and pasting a quote and then just writing AHHHH or OOOOH), it’s still a reminder that I thought that something was important enough to comment on at the time.

to jog my memory: Particularly for long series, but also just when I abandon something in the middle for an extended time. For a long visual novel like 神学校, taking notes was essential to being able to pick it up easily again after a long break, knowing exactly where I was before, which characters were important, and what mysteries were still unsolved. When reading a series with a lot of characters, I can be like “Wait, who is this guy? Have we met him before?” and then just quickly search the name in my vault.

to inform recommendations: This is something I’ve been thinking more about since studying Bibliotherapy last year. Has it ever happened to you that someone has asked your opinion on a book, and you’ve read it, but you can’t remember a single useful thing to say about it? That won’t happen with reading notes! What’s more, you can use the search function to look up keywords (like “patriotism”, “revenge”, or “mofumofu fuwafuwa”) to suggest books for your friends. You can also skim your notes to check for any heavy themes or triggers before making a recommendation.

because it’s fun and it’s probably good for you: This is what it comes down to. I enjoy having opinions on the things I read, and writing them down ensures that they don’t become lost in the ether after five minutes. Also I think that reading attentively (not even especially critically, I don’t think you need to be an analyst with everything you read) helps make you a better thinker in general, and more engaged with the things you read elsewhere. The UK is in the midst of what a recent report described as a “literacy crisis”, partially exacerbated by the pandemic, and over 7 million British adults lack basic reading skills. The more you read, and think about what you read, the less susceptible you are to being manipulated by propaganda.

Are you an Obsidian zealot already, or maybe you’re tempted by this post? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Leave a comment

Such is the power of Writing Meditation, by habit formation consultant Takeshi Furukawa (古川武士). This is a book I really loved, which methodically explains a comprehensive, non-gimmicky system to organise your brain and begin to live life on purpose.

To start off, if you can read Japanese, you should DEFINITELY buy this book: it's full of more useful and meaningful content than I could possibly summarise here. Because I found it SO useful, I felt like these ideas deserved to be enjoyed by an English-speaking audience, so I'm sharing some of what I've learnt from this book in this post.

overview

The system of Writing Meditation is a journaling practice that's broken into three steps.

• step 1: meditation. Once a day, for 15 minutes, spend time getting your thoughts out of your head and on to paper.

• step 2: organise. Once a month, complete five exercises which help you make sense of your month's journaling, notice patterns, and formulate a plan forward.

• step 3: habit forming. Analyse and assess the previous three months, tweak and customise your plans, and continue to take action.

Why is introspective journaling useful? As Furukawa puts it, 「生きている限り、自己との関係には終わりがありません」; for as long as we're alive, we will be in a relationship with ourself. It's the single most important relationship we have. Spending some small amount of time on self-analysis via these writing exercises could be viewed as a kind of "self maintenance". Furukawa's opinion is that this method combines three effective strategies: the power of noticing— seeing things as they really are; the power of organising— sorting the essential from the non-essential, decluttering; and the power of self awareness—understanding yourself and increasing your emotional intelligence.

step 1: 瞑想 (meditation)

Who am I? What do I like to do? Where do I begin? How do I put my feelings into words? If journaling feels impossible because you're overwhelmed by questions like this, it's absolutely fine. First of all, set an alarm for a minute. Close your eyes, focus on only how you feel right now, and take deep breaths. In this first stage, you will spend 15 minutes reflecting on your day by asking yourself: what drained my energy today? And what gave me energy? When the alarm goes off, start writing.

When thinking about what drained your energy, it's a chance to get the day's troubles, worries, regrets, self-loathing and anger out. When writing about what recharged your energy: think about small feelings of accomplishment, learning new things, making connections, and ways that spending your time felt pleasant.

After you've answered those two questions, in any format you like, whether it's bullet points or a free-form paragraph, the next stage is self talk. This is an unfiltered dialogue with yourself about the two points above. For energy-depletion: what was the thing I hated the most today? What was the hardest? Whatever words float to mind, let yourself write them naturally, like a conversation. Then for energy recharging, you can ask yourself: what was the most exciting and fun today? What made me the happiest, when did I feel lost in something?

You can also identify the key words that arise: for energy depletion, it could be anxiety, boredom, confusion, anger or uselessness. For energy recharging, it could be satisfaction, soothing, self-belief, security, or freedom.

Furukawa writes that there might be a temptation to ignore the negatives and to want to focus on the positives. However, he deeply feels that life's most important messages are hidden in the "マイナス感情": the negative feelings. By refusing to confront them, we risk missing out on valuable knowledge. For example, a journaler could realise that in their energy depletion self talk, they often write about feelings of being trapped. This could lead to the useful insight that the journaler values freedom as an important part of their life. The negatives and positives exist as mirror versions of each other, inexorably entwined.

step 2: 片付け (organise)

Starting a budget tracker helps us learn where our money is going. Similarly, journaling helps us realise where our energy and attention is going: but both are only true if we actually look back at what's been logged, and analyse the results. That's what stage two: organise, is for. 片付け can also be translated as "tidying up", which I find a very charming image, and the author himself compares this stage to Marie Kondo's viral tidying up method. In fact, he even recommends that you use her ときめく(sparks joy) feeling as a metric to help you decide how to navigate this part.

Step 2 happens at the end of every month, whereupon you do 5 exercises taking around 10-15 minutes each: three based on looking inwards, and two related to taking action and forging forward.

1. Impact Diagram

Look back at your journal or just think over the month's key events/feelings, and organise them on a spectrum of "depletion" to "recharging".

2. Values Map

What is important to me? Let the words burst naturally from you like a spring: playfulness, challenge, stability, simplicity, growth, friendship. Organise them however you like, whether as leaves on a tree, as a pyramid of needs, or any way that feels right. Feel free to doodle too.

3. Ideal Vision

Your ideal vision is a projection of your values, and will be informed by the previous exercise. Here, imagine a time frame of 1-3 years from now, and think of some things you would have in your dream life at that time. Don't be afraid of others' laughs or judgement when crafting your ideal vision, and don't be worried about being realistic either: be guided by your excitement. In your ideal life in three years, where will you be living? What work will you be doing, and how do you spend your days off? What relationships do you have, and what in your life makes you happiest?

Stages 4 and 5 turn these introspective exercises into tangible action.

4. Action List

Brainstorm all the things that you'd need to do on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis to make this ideal vision become a reality. Put specific dates and frequencies on them: like "50 push ups every day", or "write a blog post every week" or "sign up for a college course by the end of October". Then, mark your three favourite things on that list— by whatever metric you prefer— with a star.

5. Habit Plan.

Now to close the gap between reality and ideal. Start by drawing out your current schedule, as it is, realistically. Then draw a second schedule, that incorporates the things you starred in the previous exercise. Furukawa says the key phrase here is 「絞る！絞る！下げる！」(“Shrink it! Shrink it! Lower it!”). That is, make things tiny to start. If your action plan had you devoting several hours a day to painting, start by carving out half an hour a day. Schedule time for just 10 push-ups a day.

step 3: 習慣化 (habit forming)

The final stage is a reflection and evaluation process, to be done every quarter. Furukawa posits that self reflection and action are two cogs in the same machine, two processes that work together back and forth to feed progress. Action without self reflection runs the risk of getting you further from where you want to be, and self reflection with no action doesn't get you anywhere at all. This concept definitely rings true with my experience, and the smartest people I know are constantly setting goals, taking action and then re-evaluating, tweaking and fiddling and optimising. It also reminded me of a quote from James Clear's newsletter:

Whether a decision is good or bad can change based on how you act after the choice is made.

(...)There is nothing left but to pay attention to what you like, continue to iterate, and commit to making the most of each opportunity. There is no perfect decision. Good decisions are made right after the fact.

Furukawa calls this final quarterly exercise the "GPS", which stands for three stages of Good, Problem, Solution.

Good: write about what's gone well over the past three months. Things that you achieved, things that made you happy, things that were good experiences. What were you most grateful for?

Problem: what didn't you achieve that you wanted to? What didn't go so well? Do you have regrets, times you messed up?

Solution: what are you going to continue doing from the "good" section? How are you going to improve or eliminate things from the "problem" section? What will you do next?

in summary:

As I said at the beginning, the real book is full of far more information than this bare-bones explanation of the technique, including Furukawa's specific stationery recommendations, his personalised versions of the course for different types of people, and a link to his 30 day workshop where he talks you through getting started journaling via encouraging daily emails. There are also many many examples and ideas to help you come unstuck. It's a very worthwhile read.

What struck me as I read this book was how I realised I already utilised this process in a much more haphazard informal way already, and how it's helped me break through times I've felt trapped and stagnant. At the beginning of the year, I set goals in various areas: reading, study, exercise, and general brain-rot defence. Then I broke them down into what needs to happen daily or weekly to make those goals happen: e.g. Fit Boxing on the switch 3x a week, 30 minutes of JLPT study a day, no phone allowed in the bedroom before bed. Every week, in an Obsidian note, I do a written check-in on each of these goals, in a freeform, conversational way, being honest about how it went and what needs to happen to change if necessary. I think the important thing is touching that list of goals as often as possible, rather than falling into the trap of making New Years Resolutions and then forgetting what they even were by February. Obsidian works for me, but I can understand using physical paper for your journaling lends it a certain tangibility and immediacy. I'm going to start using the three stage method in 書く瞑想 and see if it brings more benefits.

As well as the technique itself, I felt that the book in general was written with both kindness but a fundamental belief in a person’s ability for self-realisation. To me, the message was “everyone deserves to live a life that makes them happy”. Furukawa never judges or criticises the clients he describes in his examples, whether they’re trapped in a vortex of anger, hopelessly unable to set boundaries, or engaging in self-destructive bad habits. He merely presents a ladder by which a person can take steps to drag themselves up and out. It was also not prescriptive in what anyone’s self-realised life ought to look like, instead encouraging the reader to find the answers themself.

I'd love to hear how different people utilise journaling for their mental health and to help them live the kind of life they desire. Any other book recommendations (特に日本語で) on the topic would be very welcome!

I've been thinking a lot about reading recently (and always), and how my favourite periods of reading in Japanese were when I was reading a LOT: in the peak days of my Tadoku contest career I was reading over 170 pages every day, and although that energy is difficult to sustain indefinitely, I very vividly feel that the benefits of reading (especially in a foreign language) get exponentially better the more time you put in. Conversely, the times I felt "in a reading slump", the truth is I was letting a bad book block my energy, which was making me read slower, which was keeping me stuck for longer. I think that this can be true for almost everything we want to achieve results in: whether that's study, fitness, or creative hobbies. Something we want to do feels nebulously 'bad'→ we avoid it→ the thing never gets better. Later, it becomes an enormous regret.

However, if you ram the problem extremely hard by putting your maximum power towards it, devoting the top limit amount of hours you have to it, you will not only inevitably break through, probably faster than you expected: but you will also learn how to solve problems better in the future. AND other more abstract skills like emotional resilience and general self-awareness.

In James Clear's viral self-help book Atomic Habits, he suggests contracting positive habits into a "two minute version" like just putting your shoes on in order to start the habit of running. The idea of course, is that once you have your shoes on, you’ll usually do the running anyway. My problem with very small habits is that because they’re so easy to do, they’re so easy to NOT do. I know my own capacity for doing the bare minimum. After all, a year of putting your shoes on every single day (and then taking them off) leads you to net zero results. And I’m afraid to say, a year of 5 minutes a day of Duolingo trends towards ALMOST zero results.

The first time I felt keenly aware of this phenomenon of small habits not working for me was when I started out learning Japanese. An "atomic" approach, doing a little bit of WaniKani, a page of a textbook a week or so, meant that I managed to spend a year getting nowhere in particular.

So instead, when I wanted to get serious, I tried the opposite: making the habit as big as possible. I opted to cram 30 new flashcards a day, which led to daily Anki time of 45-ish minutes. It was a habit that was manageable, but far too large to avoid. I made immense progress in only a month, and saw results very quickly, which was extremely motivating (others have had success with an hour plus or even two hours of Anki a day in this crucial front-loading stage: an above-average capacity to embrace the grind can result in even faster results). The habit stuck, and led to an Anki streak of over 1250 days. Nowadays I only use Anki when I feel like it, or I'm working towards a specific goal: but I needed that initial "hardcore" period to cement the habit and launch me into a phase of Japanese where I could actually understand stuff.

I had a similar experience doing NaNoWriMo. I had dicked around for a couple of years doing writing exercises at my writing club every other week, and had the nagging, vague feeling that I "had a novel in me", but had very little else to show for myself. When National Novel Writing Month rolled around in 2023— a competition that encourages you to write a 50k word draft of a novel in just 30 days— it awoke the tadoku-demon in me and I bashed out the bones of my wrestling-themed animal-ears isekai romance, start-to-finish, in the allotted time. The daily goal of 1667 words didn’t allow for much angsting or procrastinating. I had to have my hands on the keyboard for an hour to 90 minutes a day, every day, otherwise it wasn't going to get done. In that way, the habit became too big to ignore. I had to make it the priority of my day.

When I read pro-wrestler Hiroshi Tanahashi's book 全力で生きる技術, initially I didn't really particularly expect the lessons to be applicable to my own life, being that he is a super macho athlete and I am... very not that. In reality, his philosophy of "living life at full power" rang true with my own experiences in all these aspects of my life, and also made me realise what an immense gift it is to give oneself: to go hog wild with the thing we're passionate about, to realise that even if it fails, there are no wasted experiences. The message of the book that I took to heart was: have the courage to try your very best.

Of course, you may have stories about yourself that you need to confront before you can find the energy for full power living. Before I went full-power with a Japanese N1 grammar sprint last year (fellow Accountability April buddies rise up!) I had told myself "I'm a bad student", "I'm lazy", and "I just don't get grammar", and had those self-limiting beliefs buried so deep in my core it felt like the catchphrases on a stick of Blackpool rock. My solution was just to entertain the idea "but what if that wasn't true?" just long enough to shut up that voice and get my nose to the grindstone to blast through grammar textbooks for several hours a day throughout the whole month of April. Even if I'm not a good student, I can LARP as a good student. What's the worst that could happen? I'll come out of it slightly better at Japanese. Best case scenario, I come out of it a LOT better at Japanese.

My very wise senpai has another piece of advice for tackling the idea of "I'm not the kind of person who does X"— the beautifully simple phrase "why don't you try being a person who does the opposite of whatever you normally do?" In this way, might you discover that you're not the type of person you thought you were?

Additionally, the very act of trying to go balls to the wall with something forces you to confront whatever was keeping you stuck. If you HAVE to do something all day every day, how can you make it fun, or at least bearable? Could you gamify it, turn it into a competition, or make a satisfying spreadsheet tracker? Could you incorporate something that you already like? Could you utilise a tool, or multimedia approach, like involving audio or pictures? Do you need to ditch an idea, or book, or even a dream, that you thought you wanted but actually is holding you back?

If you’re not enjoying reading (despite wanting to be a person who reads), and you drop your reading habit down to a page a day, you are unlikely to get to the bottom of what the problem is. Is the book annoying you, is the font too small, is your chair uncomfortable? These things would be easy to overlook in a two-minute habit, and have the potential to keep us stuck indefinitely. But what if you said “I’m going to read for four hours this Saturday”? By the end of that session, you’re much more likely to have figured out what the blockage was, purely by necessity. That way you can head into next week armed with self-knowledge and a new plan.

I acknowledge there are also real-world limitations that we all live with that dictate the maximum ceiling of "full power living". Personally, I have chronic illness which takes up a percentage of my life I don't even like to describe in cold hard numbers because it depresses me too much. All that matters is that you hit the accelerator as hard as it can go safely in your own personal car, not that you beat the race with someone else's. You can't possibly fail, because essentially all you're doing is a science experiment: the results are important data that will inform you about what to do next.

In short, my advice is: if going easy on yourself hasn’t worked- try going hardcore. Just for a bit. See what you can achieve.

What “hardcore” looks like is for you to decide.

This year I started to study bibliotherapy— a type of counselling which uses conversations about books to promote well-being— and it’s made me start to think of reading on more axes than just enjoyable→ not enjoyable, but rather to consider the power of the right book at the right time. Not just my favourites; but the ones that felt important! Here’s a reading recap of my 2024, with a few fun stats, and a whistlestop tour of the 12 most impactful books I read this year.

stats and nerdery

This year I read 50 books in Japanese (plus a few dozen manga which aren’t covered here)! This was by far my best reading year, and I’m excited to see if I can beat it next year.

I mostly read on the excellent web-based e-reader ttu, which meant that I could take advantage of tools like yomitan. It’s also convenient reading on my computer because I like to take notes in Obsidian, something I got into in a big way thanks to the recommendation of . I also got a fair bit of use out of my kindle, though.

The length breakdowns are as follows: “short”= under 175 pages, “medium”= 175-275 pages, “long”= 275-425 pages, and “very long”= 425+ pages. I thought that having a goal of books read this year might end up being a perverse incentive to read a lot of very short books, but it turns out this year’s reading has been pretty balanced!

I’m also pretty happy with this balance too. One thing I learnt from talking to readers I met through my bibliotherapy class, is that a lot of people seem to REALLY hate self-help books; but I actually kind of love them, and I read some fun ones in Japanese this year! I think the best way to get good advice is to expose yourself to lots of advice, even if you don’t agree with everything the author says.

Star rankings! I read 9 books this year I would class as absolute masterpieces, which is a pretty great percentage. There were also a few I did not vibe with at all (but only one that was offensively bad enough that I dropped, and isn’t represented in these stats). I think part of that was expectations; a few books I rated one star this year were either very highly hyped up on social media, like 誰が勇者を殺したか, or had won awards, like 何者. Conversely, most of the books I rated 5 stars were total surprises. Next year I’m going to follow my gut more in hope of finding more of those nice surprises.

monthly reading highlights

january: おやすみなさい、また明日

I started off the year with this readalong with the 別次元の図書館 bookclub. I knew the author from 美しい彼, which I loved, but didn’t know what else to expect. おやすみなさい、また明日 is a story about rebuilding a life worth living after a devastating breakup. But it’s also about a million little mundane tragedies and how to keep persevering anyway. And it’s about the act of writing itself, and about stories, and how they change people’s lives.

I've never cried at a novel as hard as I did with this one. When I finished the last page, I choked back gulping sobs until I succumbed to it entirely, and let tears cloud my glasses and sat there and snivelled until there was nothing left.

On a personal level, this book made me realise that I had been obsessed with my own tragedy, lingering in it, wallowing in it, instead of taking proactive steps to live the kind of life I wanted. It was easy for me to see Tsugumi and berate him for not asking for what he needed to not be unhappy, for not reaching out and grabbing his chances, but I was doing the same thing myself.

february: 全力で生きる技術

A motivational book by my favourite pro wrestler Hiroshi Tanahashi, and it came at exactly the right time, off the back of my underwhelming N1 results. This book helped me drag myself back up after that failure; and with his characteristically warm and avuncular tone, Tanahashi imparted some important lessons that I’ve kept in my heart this year:

• The great pleasure of life is the comeback. If we never faced opposition or failure in our lives, we wouldn’t get the delicious opportunity to turn things around.

• There are no wasted experiences in life. Just by the act of trying, you’ve learnt something, and even defeats and mistakes may prove to be useful experiences to future you.

• Trying hard is cool! It’s tempting to want to not try our best, because of fear of the embarrassment of failure. If we don’t try, when we fail, we can say “well I didn’t try, so it’s okay”. But instead, Tanahashi encourages you to live life at full power: if something is worth doing, it’s worth trying hard.

march: 甘くて切ない

One of the aforementioned lovely surprises of the year, this is a book I bought entirely for the cover. Ritsu thinks he’s fairly content with his life; with his job at the mall opticians; with eating his packed lunch in the food court every day— apart from the lingering shadow of his difficult relationship with his mother sometimes looming over him. But when a familiar-looking visitor turns up at the opticians one day, he becomes involved in a friendship that leads him to re-examine a lot of things about himself that he thought he had buried forever.

This book handles the theme of 親孝行 (filial piety) very delicately and thoughtfully, and it had me thinking about my own family, about bonds of love and bonds of obligation. What do we owe to our mothers for bringing us up? What do we owe to our younger siblings? How can one be a “good son”(or daughter)? If you have ever had a complicated family relationship, you might find this book healing to some degree.

april: Atomic Habits

This is a funny one, because I actually read it in English before the pandemic, but reading it 5 years later in a different language gave it an entirely different flavour, and I took different things from it. I was also doing a studying sprint at the time (shout out to my Accountability April crew!) and it felt like very poignant timing.

To be honest, some of this book I disagreed with, as I’ve documented before, but it’s earned its spot as an important book, because all through the year I’ve kept coming back to one concept that it explores. It’s been useful over and over again, as I’ve re-evaluated my goals, faced setbacks, and explored roadblocks to my own success.

That is the idea of "identity". James Clear talks extensively about the role that identity plays in habit-forming, and it made me realise the identities I was holding on to that weren't serving me any more. Like most self-help books, I would recommend taking what feels useful to you from it, and discarding the rest.

may: DEADLOCK

My absolute favourite book I read this year.

DEA Agent Yuuto has been convicted of a crime he didn’t commit: and to make things worse, it’s the murder of his beloved longtime police partner. Now he has to navigate the choppy waters of California maximum security prison, where he finds himself both facing terrifying violence, and forming unlikely alliances.

This is an excellent book just from an entertainment standpoint: the pace is breakneck and it reads like an American TV drama in novel format. But it’s also very intelligently written, and tackles themes like racial segregation, class solidarity, and the USA for-profit prison industrial complex. I found Yuuto’s stoicism and strength in the face of seemingly impossible circumstance so inspiring. And if you’ve ever had your personhood stripped from you; ever had your freedom— whether literal or psychological— seized from you, , you might find him inspiring too.

The story totally gripped me, and effortlessly pulled me into its realistically gritty world. Would recommend wholeheartedly (with the caveat of a trigger warning of sexual violence).

june: FLESH&BLOOD

They say books can take you places, but this book inspired me to literally go on a journey to retrace the steps of its protagonist. FLESH&BLOOD was a series I tried to start the previous year, but had to shelve for being too hard at the time. I was so pleased to finally defeat the first volume, and found myself completely sucked into the world and utterly compelled by its characters. I’ve already written a lot about this one in the post linked above, so I’ll leave it there, but this was another of my 5 star reads in 2024.

july: 十角館の殺人

A classic mystery novel about a bunch of detective fiction-enthusiast university students on an isolated island. This ended up being important in a really convoluted way. I knew that this book was inspired by the Agatha Christie novel And Then There Were None (initially released under a much more unsavoury name), which meant that when my mum spotted a poster for a stageplay production of the same, we grabbed the opportunity to go see that together. Then later in the year, I started playing the mystery visual novel 大穢 (Ooe), also inspired by And Then There Were None, which I would never have known about if it weren't for 十角館, and that meant I could enjoy the references and the different approach after seeing a different Japanese interpretation of the closed-room murder format. Additionally, later in the year, I was able to recommend 十角館 to an Agatha Christie fan I met via bibliotherapy. It felt like this book ended up being in the centre of a bunch of things aligning.

The book itself: it dragged a bit! The end was satisfying, and the mystery-nerdery enjoyable, but the setup was quite interminable, and the gender roles were jarringly outdated.

august: 愛がしたたる一皿を

If nothing else, this book is important because it inspired me to start this blog!

september : 愛を与える獣達 3

This month I started taking a course in bibliotherapy skills. In its formal manifestation as a therapy it's in its infancy— the course I did was the first of its kind in the world. But in a broader sense, the healing power of books has been acknowledged for as long as books have been around. Thinking about the therapeutic benefits of “book prescriptions” made a lot of things I had half suspected click for me, and I started to view my own year’s reading through a different lens.

So in September I finished the third volume of the 愛を与える獣達 series. was the one who initially invited me to read it with them, back in September 2022, and it was such a wonderful surprise. It was my first time reading a webnovel (although I've now switched to the published volumes) and it felt like it was suddenly really clicking to me how exciting it was being able to read Japanese; how many doors were opening to incredible stories. It's a series about a mild-mannered Japanese doctor who finds himself in a land of enormous beast-eared men, and the unexpected tribulations and joys that ensue. The series doesn't lack drama or violence, but it is at its core immensely comforting, and I felt that keenly as I finished volume three.

october: オオカミパパに溺愛されています

This was the book I took with me on my Francis Drake Minibreak, my solo holiday for my birthday. It’s a very fluffy romance that was perfect for a holiday read, and one of my favourite reading memories of the year is of devouring a chapter of this in an indulgent mid-afternoon hotel bath.

november: その悩み、大胸筋で受けとめる

Another Tanahashi book! This is a compilation of his advice column from a Japanese women's magazine, and covers topics of anguish as diverse as terminal illness diagnosis, marriage regret, and a friend who smells bad. Tanahashi really has solid, empathetic advice on a range of subjects, and as a similar demographic to the 30-somethings writing in, I felt particularly seen when he advised women who felt behind in life.

I finished this book merely hours before I headed out to my bibliotherapy practical, where I used the skills I'd learnt from my course with members of the public for the first time. In the afterword, Tanahashi gives some perspective on how he answered the questions in this book (the quote in the picture above). Roughly, “I don’t tell people ‘do this’, but rather try to answer by saying ‘how would it feel if you did this?’, and give them a gentle push on the back.” I decided to carry this energy with me to the bibliotherapy event, and it was (I think!) an enormous success.

december: SPY×FAMILY 家族の肖像

I read this whole book during our very first 24-hour readathon over in the bookclub. Despite being deep in the throes of covid, I had so much fun at this event, and loved the feeling of connection with other readers around the world. The novel was a perfect pick, divided into four mini-stories, very funny and moreish. It felt just like watching the anime in novel format. The audiobook was also excellent! The readathon is already such a special memory, and I want to host more in 2025! Below is a graphic of everything that our members read during the event.

book prescriptions

Thank you for reading this far! I hope your 2024 was full of wonderful books, and that there are many ahead in your new year too.

In the spirit of bibliotherapy, I'd like to end this post with a handful of book "prescriptions". I've already discussed most of these books above, but here they are framed in a way that you can pick a recommendation for yourself based on what you need right now. I hope they can be useful!

• 💊 For when you need to find resilience and perseverance after you've been treated cruelly and unfairly: DEADLOCK by 英田 サキ

• 💊 For when you want to pick yourself back up on your feet after a setback, and to face new challenges with a fresh perspective: 全力で生きる技術 by 棚橋 弘至

• 💊 For when your family members are taking more than you have to offer: 甘くて切ない by 月村 奎

• 💊 For when your actions are out of step with your intentions: Atomic Habits by James Clear

• 💊 For when you feel like a traveller in an alien land: FLESH & BLOOD by 松岡 なつき

• 💊 For when you've been going too hard, and you need permission to be kinder to yourself: 「誰かのため」に生きすぎない by 藤野 智哉

Happy new year and here's to a 2025 full of lots more reading!

To elaborate: how many of you have been guilty of this thought pattern? If only I could... get up at 5am; study out of a textbook for an hour a day; ignore all distractions; write out my notes perfectly.... THEN I would progress in Japanese! Progressing feels impossible with your current, flawed, weak, hedonistic self. Instead, you fixate on the future self, a fictional construct who has somehow overcome all of those flaws, and is imbued with ferocious self control and discipline.

Unfortunately, I don't know anyone for whom that type of future self has manifested— not permanently, in any case. Lying in bed, planning all the things we're going to do tomorrow, it's easy to imagine a version of ourselves that feels enthusiastic about doing 90 minutes of Core 2K every day, who will patiently do textbook exercises, who doesn’t scroll instagram reels any more. In the cold light of the next morning, that self evaporates. Then of course, we criticise ourselves, not the method: if only we could be morally stronger, if only we could overpower our boredom and tiredness, THEN the method would work. The truth is, the method is entirely replaceable. It's ourselves that we should be working around.

We are all prone to akrasia— that is , making decisions against our best interest. So what's the solution?

Work with the flawed today self, move the goalposts to where you are now, personality wise— and crucially, remove choices for yourself.

On Jan 1st 2021 (at around a shaky N5 level, if that helps set the scene) I made the decision that I would never read anything translated into English from Japanese ever again— and to date, I’ve stuck to it! It was a commitment that a lot of people called crazy (and toxic, and worse), but ended up being the single best thing I did for my Japanese. I think the misunderstanding that people tend to make is that they think it was a type of punishment— whereas in fact, it became an extremely fun problem solving exercise, that didn’t deprive me of anything I enjoyed. Nothing was locked away! I could watch anime, as much as I wanted— as long as I used Japanese subtitles. Left with the choice of the easy way out, I would have kept on taking it, and I would probably still be reading inadequately fanslated manga to this very day. By removing the choice, the only decision left to make was "how can I enjoy this in Japanese?"

So, inevitably, I started to work with my flawed self: I love lying in bed and I love reading fanfiction, so rather than trying to purge myself of those habits, that January I made a new routine where I would read Final Fantasy 15 (my current obsession at that time) doujinshi in bed every morning before I got up. I "read" really casually, not being picky, only looking up words that jumped out at me, and if I couldn't understand much then I just enjoyed the pictures. The comics featured characters I already knew, so I was never totally lost, and were only around 20-30 pages long, so reading one a day, even at a snail's pace, wasn't a big commitment. If a particular panel seemed useful or helped something click for me, I screenshot it and put it in anki.

Touching native Japanese without a crutch, without any translation, also had the benefit that it acted as a guiding pendulum to point me where I needed to go next. I could constant recalibrate what needed to happen in order to progress, which would have been totally obscured if I'd continued to use English translations. For example, when I was first reading the doujinshi, I noticed my katakana reading was still shaky. So I spent a few days focussing a katakana matching game , and noticed improvements immediately. Later that month, watching the Free! anime, I spotted lots of grammar I didn't know; so I googled it and made anki cards right from the anime. It was impossible to feel stuck, because every immersion experience gave me instant feedback. What was important was that I was working with what motivated me, my real flawed fickle self. Learning grammar from Tae Kim's guide felt impossibly dry, no matter how much I wanted to want to read it, but learning grammar from bishounen swim boys with oshi seiyuu felt much more appealing.

The youtuber Ali Abdaal has a question in his book Feel-Good Productivity: "What would this look like if it was fun?" I love that, and it also makes me think of another useful question we could ask ourselves on our language journeys: "What would this look like if it was possible?"

For example, if you want to read a manga in Japanese, which feels too difficult at the moment, how could you turn that from "impossible" to "possible"? There are a bunch of ways forward. You could decide to do the thing imperfectly, you could "read" by skimming the manga to spot words or kanji that you recognise, look up anything that piques your interest, and just let the rest go— this is how I started with my FFXV fancomics. Another technique could be that you go through the manga quite intensively, making anki cards of vocab and sentences, trying to understand as much as possible. A third method could be that you decide to hit another goal before you read that manga, like you finish repping a vocab deck and then revisit and see what it feels like then. A fourth way could be watching the anime of the manga first, and getting an idea of the story from that, before going back to it. The point is, there's ALWAYS a way forward, and doing the cognitive switch from "no" to "maybe" is really important.

But you'll never figure out these ways forward, how to learn and grow, if you stay wedded to the mythos of the future self. You have to get on the bike and start pedalling now. Immersion has to be a TODAY thing, not a "would be nice some time in the future" thing.

If you choose the nuclear option, like I did, to ditch translations cold turkey one day, you WILL have the experience of trying lots of things that are too hard and having to give up on them for a while, and change course. That's not a failing! That's part of the process. It's more data points for the grand experiment. The great thing is that there are SO many things to enjoy in Japanese media that you'll never run out.

You might want Japanese to be like a college course, a neatly laid out curriculum that you follow and arrive at fluency. But have you ever had genuine success with that method before? Has it led you to being able to do what you want to be doing? If not, perhaps you should realise that language learning is best done chaotically, holistically, pulling from multiple sources and getting a 360° perspective. There is a human desire for certainty, I understand that, but when you remove your translation crutch you will realise that you're an individual with your own interests and passions and goals, so why would you follow a generic path made for the average person?

If you're vibing and having fun, you're winning. If you're stressing, or self flagellating, you need to re-evaluate what you're doing. And no one can do that for you. If anyone tries to tell you there's one true path to language mastery, they're trying to sell you something.

Stop beating yourself up and learn to love doujin.

愛国心は理屈ではない。それは魂に刻印されているものなのだろう。

When flagged up the existence of FLESH & BLOOD to me last year— an epic historical pirate isekai BL light novel series with over 20 drama CDs— I didn't need very much convincing at all to embark on the first novel. However, it was a surprising and delightful bonus that this series begins in my home of Devon in the south west of England. What started off as a ticklish novelty, as places I recognised got namedropped (in unfamiliar katakana forms), then blossomed into a real nagging urge to visit all those places: to map the journey of volume one, and to tread the ground that the schoolboy protagonist Kaito did, as he got sucked back into time to 1500s England— the era of legendary privateer Sir Francis Drake. The locations were so lovingly described that I felt certain that the author must have visited them herself as research for the novel, so potentially it would be her footsteps I would be following in too. After a bit of scheming and planning, that's exactly what I did, and I spent my birthday week at the beginning of October on what I've been affectionately calling my Francis Drake Minibreak.

This blog post will have spoilers for the main plot beats of the first volume of FLESH & BLOOD!

The novel actually opens with Kaito and his friend Kazuya— both Japanese schoolboys enrolled in a private London boarding school— in Land’s End, the very furthest south point of England. They’re on a holiday Kaito planned with the theme of 『女王陛下の海賊を追って』(In Pursuit of Her Majesty’s Pirates— I suppose my trip could be called 『女王陛下の海賊を追う海斗を追って』) to visit locations that had piqued his interest from history classes. I decided not to trace the journey all the way down to Cornwall, where the book starts, because as Kaito rightly points out, there is 「なーんもねぇ」there. Instead, I jumped in when Kaito and Kazuya travel up to Plymouth to start their next leg of their journey.

冒険の原: ドレイクの太鼓

On the train up to Devon, Kaito and Kazuya talk about Sir Francis Drake, the most famous of Queen Elizabeth’s pirates, and his legendary drum: about the intriguing myth that the drum sounds by itself when England is faced with great danger. Being that the man himself carried it with him until his death, Kaito feels that even if it doesn't have supernatural powers, it could somehow be imbued with the thoughts and feelings of Francis Drake. Kazuya shoots him down, saying that these kind of ideas are just delusions. Still, Kaito is excited to see the drum in person at the Maritime Museum, and even cheekily hints that if it wasn't inside a showcase, he might be tempted to bang it himself.

Here’s the drum, and where all the trouble of the entire FLESH & BLOOD series began! It’s currently in the Box Museum in Plymouth, along with a mildly threatening caption from the museum curator.

タイムスリップの現場: プリマス・ホー

The pair then traverse Plymouth Hoe, the coastland area of the city, and see the impressive Francis Drake statue and Smeaton Lighthouse. Blessed with similar good weather, I was able to sit by the lighthouse myself and read my kindle for an hour.

However, in the world of FLESH & BLOOD, storm clouds begin to gather. It's then, standing here on Plymouth Hoe, that Kaito hears the sinister トントン of a drum beat... an odd but familiar sort of noise, and then before he knows it, he is gruesomely sucked into a time portal.

Unconscious, Kaito is later discoveredー or should I say... earlier, discovered, because the year is now 1587— by dashing Spanish spy Vincent, and it's hard to tell from the illustration, but I think it's likely that it was somewhere in this area.

ドレイクの家:バックランド・アビィ

An awful lot of very exciting things happen in the middle part of this book, which I won’t detail in their entirety; but crucially, Kaito ends up meeting the handsome, swashbuckling ship captain Jeffrey, who takes him under his wing as a cabin boy. Soon afterwards, Jeffrey gets a message from an emissary of Sir Francis Drake himself, requesting his presence at his residence of Buckland Abbey. Jeffrey takes Kaito with him, on a gruelling horseback ride through the Devon moors…

This was my favourite part of the trip, and the location where I felt the closest sense of connection to the story. Buckland Abbey is really gorgeous. It's been through several incarnations in its 700 year history, including being owned by King Henry VIII, but it's Francis Drake's time there that has left the greatest stamp, and a lot of the house has been preserved just like it was back when he was living there.

While waiting nervously to meet Francis Drake, Kaito stares at a tapestry glimmering in golds and silvers, portraying Drake's beloved ship that accompanied him in his round the world voyage, the Golden Hind (黄金の雌鹿号). It wasn't a tapestry, but I spotted this painting, and thought about how it must feel to be in such a momentous and surreal situation, expecting a man from the history books to descend the stairs.

Reluctant to confess his time-traveller status, Kaito invents a convincing cock-and-bull story about his origin to Drake and Jeffrey, about being ambushed on his travels from Japan with a missionary voyage. I think I even found the globe which could have been the one where Kaito traces his journey in this illustration.

There were several guest bedrooms we were allowed to explore in Buckland Abbey, and I speculated which one might have the one where Kaito stayed that uncomfortable night, forced to eschew his daily bath and to do his business in a chamber pot.

Downstairs, there was a replica of Drake’s drum which you were allowed to touch! I was too afraid to bang it though…

Kaito ends up endearing himself to Drake so much that he wants to take him in as an adopted son, but Jeffrey won’t give him up that easily, and takes him home to Plymouth to prepare to set sail in a voyage in Jeffrey’s ship, the Gloria.

黄金の雌鹿号

Back in Plymouth, Jeffrey gets Kaito suited and booted and ready to depart. The Gloria is a fictional ship, but what I could visit was the replica Golden Hind which is moored in Brixham, a Devon seaside village. I thought it might bear some resemblance to The Gloria, and it helped me imagine things a bit better, especially going into volume 2 where Kaito begins his seafaring adventure. I was struck by how narrow and cramped it looked, with its breadth being only 23 feet wide: how claustrophobic it would be with a full crew of 80. But for now, this is where volume 1, and my holiday, ended!

ちょっと悲しい結末

While planning this trip, I was overwhelmed with a sense of emotional connection to the author Natsuki Matsuoka; someone I'd never met or even seen the face of, a woman born thousands of miles away. She wrote passionately and with great detail and imagination about my humble corner of the world, in Japanese for a Japanese audience, and her novels reached me, living within a stone's throw of the locations described.

I felt a burning need to somehow tell her about my plan for my trip— and to ask her if she did the same trip, many years ago, before the release of the first book in 2001. I wanted to thank her for her writing and share my excitement about continuing to read the adventures of Kaito and Jeffrey.

I typed Matsuoka-sensei's name into google, and my heart dropped as the search box auto-completed "松岡なつき 病気". I found a twitter post of hers from 2016 where she describes being diagnosed with breast cancer, feeling terribly tired, and her desire to continue the story of FLESH & BLOOD. Her last tweet is from June 2018. I tried to search for an obituary, for any other information, for any trace of her, but I came up empty.

The story of FLESH & BLOOD remains unfinished, at volume 24, released in June 2015. I can't help wishing I'd started learning Japanese ten years earlier.

I decided to write what I wanted to say to her in a letter anyway, just for myself.

:UPDATE December 2024: Today I saw the news that after ten years, Matsuoka-sensei is going to be continuing the series next year! I’ve never been more happy to be wrong in my life.

At the time, my confidence with other mediums was fairly solid, but I still felt like my book-reading skills fell short. I was slow and awkward. I’d get lost in long sentences, forgetting where we started and which particles were doing what. I felt naked without yomitan, and physical books felt very arduous indeed.

Cut to now! In the last year I've read 50 (non-manga) books in Japanese! One short story collection, two novellas, five non-fiction books, and 42 novels. I'll spare any commentary or reviews on those books for now, because I'd love to devote more time to talking about my favourites fully at a later date, but for now I wanted to share the tips and mantras which have really helped me be able to stay consistent with this goal of daily reading in Japanese. I hope they can help you too!

ABUNDANCE MINDSET: as much as possible, fill your house/digital devices with reading material. The more you see it, the more you’re going to want to pick it up.

PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE: make Japanese books easier to get at than English distractions. Put your kindle app front and centre of your phone home screen. Have a Japanese book within reach wherever you are!

BE GUIDED BY MOOD: and have a different book on the go for varying vibes you might be feeling at that particular time. Also, have books which require differing amounts of brainpower.

INDULGE YOUR WHIMS WHENEVER: I’ve seen advice to have a set time of day that’s carved out just for reading, and that works well for some people, but it can also build reading up into a Big Deal, when it doesn’t have to be. So have your before-bed reading ritual, for sure, but also grab pockets of reading whenever the fancy takes you. In the bath. Doctor's waiting room. Waiting for your pasta to boil. Etc.

EPIC TBR LIST: hoard recommendations and interesting titles whenever you see them, so that you have a large selection to pick from when making your choice of next book to read. As well as recos from friends, I like to peek at what people are reading in the 相性 tab on bookmeter, or browse tags on chil-chil.net, or just utilise the recommendations feature on Amazon.

(Also feel free to FOLLOW WHIMS and ignore everything on your TBR in favour of some new shiny book you buy impulsively.)

MAKE IT SOCIAL: in the past I’ve had enormous bursts of motivation from participating in the tadoku challenge. I prefer to do things my own way these days, but I still love to talk about what I'm reading with other TL learners on discord and instagram. Its a fantastic way to get recommendations (and epubs), but also to absorb infectious enthusiasm and maybe even develop a little competitive streak that gets you reading even more.

EASY COME EASY GO: if a boring book is throttling your reading, ditch it. Or if a book is making you dread it for any other reason. It’s okay! You can always read it another time. But right now, it’s standing inbetween you and your reading dreams. Zero tolerance policy.

BECOME FRIENDS WITH FAILURE: don’t be afraid to start things you might fail. Be like a scientist impartially observing the results of your experiments, rather than taking your “did not finish” titles as an indictment on your moral fibre.

BREAK THE SPELL: don’t build up what you’re reading into a bigger deal than it needs to be. It might help to build confidence by reading things which are a little more “trashy” or disposable, rather than embarking on your childhood dream of reading War and Peace in Japanese or something. Also: YOU’RE NEVER TOO GOOD FOR TRASHY.

ONCE YOU START FINISHING, ITS EASIER TO KEEP FINISHING. Like a snowball right? You start off teeny tiny, but you’ll get there.

GET AN E-READER: I don't like to suggest that any piece of equipment or technology is essential for language learning in general, but if I had to pick one thing I'd be loathe to live without, it would be my kindle. It's all the comfort and customisability of a digital device without being a distraction box like your phone. It can fit in your pocket and provide you with enough books to last you a decade. The battery lasts forever and you can put cute stickers on it. I would never have done so much reading if it hadn't been for my kindle— I had a basic model which I then replaced with a Paperwhite earlier this year— an unnecessary upgrade, but I can read it in the bath now.

QUICK AND DIRTY: intensive reading; ie. poring over every word and considering its implications, can be a satisfying and fruitful experience, but equally don't forget that going fast and nasty (or extensive, if you prefer) has a lot of advantages. If you spend time labouring over what you don’t get, and trying to decipher stuff you’re not ready for yet, you’re wasting time that you could be plucking the low hanging fruit from the NEXT book instead.

FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT: or at least, have the capacity to entertain certain whimsical “what if”s. The big doomsaying voice inside your head might be echoing “I WON’T UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING” but all your job has to be is to challenge that with another voice that says “who cares?” or “but what if I do understand something though?” Just like a mildly sassy devil’s advocate. And the more you do this the more it becomes true.

READ A SENTENCE AND THEN ANOTHER ONE: reading a book isn’t more complicated than that, and it's not more meaningful than that. No matter how transcendent or infuriating, heart-wrenching or hilarious a book can be, at the end of the day it's just assembled of a combination of sentences, and all you have to do is start is to read one sentence. Don't overthink it!

This last year of daily reading has boosted my Japanese skills in a way that has felt almost effortless, and got me to a point where I could happily stop using Anki and feel confident that I would retain my vocabulary and comprehension (I'm back on Anki again now because... well, I can't quit you, you handsome devil, you. But it's just because it's fun, not because of any anxiety about my Japanese).

In concrete terms, I nearly doubled my average reading speed. And more importantly than the dry business of being any sort of JLPT level, I've had the chance to experience dozens of incredible stories, thought-provoking pieces of advice, perfect sentences, and perspective-shifting narratives. Reading books in Japanese has made me new friends, sent me on adventures, given me solace when I felt alone, provided me with instruction when I lacked direction, and more than anything, entertained me immensely.

Here’s to the next year of daily reading! And if you’re about to start a streak from today, then here’s to you, too!

Note: parts of this post have been rewritten/cannibalised from insta posts of mine from the last four years on the topic of reading milestones and reading motivation. You can find those original posts in full in the "reading" highlight on my instagram profile.

10. テンカウント/ Ten Count

Japanese difficulty: ♥︎♥︎♡♡♡

Perhaps the most well-known work in this list, Ten Count is about a man with a neurosis about germs so severe that he has to wear gloves everywhere he goes. He lives a life of strict limits, minimising contact with others in order to feel safe. But….. this story is not really about germs, or diseases. Its about the dichotomy of clean vs dirty; pure vs corrupted; chaste vs sinful— and Shirotani’s struggle to overcome his demons with the assistance of a wildly unethical therapist. If you like your BL served with a healthy dose of Psychological Problems, I can wholeheartedly recommend.

9. ほんと野獣/ Honto Yajuu/ Like the Beast

Japanese difficulty: ♥︎♡♡♡♡

He was an upstanding, amiable cop. He was the hot-headed son of a yakuza boss. Can I make it any more obvious? Opposites-attract stories are always so irresistible and the way this one unfolds is particularly compelling (and adorable). I think this is the easiest read on this list, and it was the first manga that I was really able to binge in Japanese. It's fluffy and sweet, and a really nice palate cleanser if you've been reading darker stuff.

8. 鬼と天国/ Oni to Tengoku

Japanese difficulty: ♥︎♥︎♥︎♡♡

Aoki is a depressed high school teacher, unlucky in love and haunted by memories of his traumatic childhood, who finds himself suddenly embroiled in a toxic game of cat and mouse with the sweet-faced but strangely sadistic school nurse, Tengoku.

This is my absolute favourite flavour of BL: an electrifying combo of trauma, violence, and dysfunctional psychosexual stuff. Crushingly sad at times, with a tiny bit of sweetness at others, and ultimately with a thread of irresistible catharsis running through it. The only reason it's not a bit higher in the list is that I think the first volume is a lot stronger than the following two.

7. 僕のおまわりさん/ Boku no Omawarisan/ My Pretty Policeman

Japanese difficulty: ♥︎♥︎♥︎♡♡

A story about a long-unrequited love finally coming to fruition! Policeman Shin has been harbouring a crush on his friend Seiji for over a decade, until one heady summer night when he finally confesses his feelings. This is such a delightful little series, super wholesome and an absolute minimum of angst, just feel-good vibes and beautiful art. I love the way Niyama-sensei writes about slightly older romances: Shin and Seiji are 30 and 39 respectively at the start of おまわりさん. There’s something so cosy about the passing of the seasons in this story: going to the summer festival in yukata, an onsen getaway in autumn…. New Year’s Eve fireworks, all the good stuff. It’s a delight seeing stoic Shin make a life with the impish Seiji.

The final volume includes an arc where Shin uses his policework skills to try and find out the name of their cat’s new boyfriend. If that isn’t the cutest thing ever…

6. カーストヘヴン/ Caste Heaven

Japanese difficulty: ♥︎♥︎♥︎♡♡

This manga is set in a high school where a dark game is played: a deck of cards are shuffled and hidden around the school, and whichever card you find determines your social rank for the following months. Kings and Queens at the top. The Joker: the lowest of the low, an acceptable target for any and all unpleasantness. Everyone else slotted inbetween. Its a story transparently about power struggle and betrayal, and the ways in which a race to the top brings out the most despicable traits in humanity. It gives me death game vibes, although it’s not technically a death game: but the strict nonsensical rules, emotional intensity, and constant backstabbing reminds me of a Danganronpa or a Squid Game type situation.

As the manga continues, it portrays the same school term from multiple perspectives, and you get to see how different ranks in the caste are managing their roles. It raises questions about the masks we wear: about what point the mask becomes the wearer, and vice versa.

5. ヤリチン☆ビッチ部/ Yarichin Bitch Club

Japanese difficulty: ♥︎♥︎♡♡♡

On his first day at Morimori Academy— a school for the sons of elites, nestled in the mountains— exchange-student Toono nervously enters the photography club. However, the scene that greets him makes it apparent he's made a dreadful mistake. This manga follows Toono as he tries to muddle through his new school life as a reluctant member of the school's infamous Yarichin Bitch Club.

This is probably the entry on this list I feel the need to give the most disclaimers for: no bones about it, this series is really, really stupid. But if you are able to leave your brain at the clubroom door, you will be rewarded with a super fun story and an unexpectedly lovable cast: before you know it, you've made real connections with the characters and you love them dearly, despite the fact that the story is unrepentantly vulgar. It's a kind of あほエロ (horny.. idiot...?) comedy, definitely not to everyone’s taste, but in my opinion absolutely worthy of a spot on this list.

The drama CD is also absolutely stellar, the whole ensemble cast put 100% into it, and it's a delight to listen to. Just… maybe wear headphones.

4. 心中するまで、待っててね

Japanese difficulty: ♥︎♥︎♡♡♡

This was a total surprise to me, as I went into it knowing nothing beforehand. It's a very disturbing and crushingly sad little two-parter.

Cheerful Fukuta is surprised to come home from work one day to find his beloved friend Aoi-niichan — who he hasn’t seen since they were children— waiting for him outside his flat.

However… Aoi ought to be six years older than Fukuta, making him 28, but the Aoi that’s waiting for Fukuta is a child. And what’s more… he’s not like Fukuta remembers at all. He used to be kind and gentle; now he’s tyrannical and controlling. Who is this Aoi? And why are Fukuta’s memories of their days together so hazy?

If you like Harada you might vibe with this. It left my stomach churned in knots, and I cried so hard through the second volume that I couldn't see through my glasses properly.

3. カラーレシピ/ Colour Recipe

Japanese difficulty: ♥︎♥︎♥︎♥︎♡

Pretty much any Harada-sensei manga could go in this spot— I think she's a genius— but Colour Recipe is the one that I love so much I have a page from it framed on my wall, so if I had to pick one, it would be this one. I nearly went for Yatamomo instead, which will crush your heart into tiny shards too, but also has a bit of a lighter comedy vibe in some parts too. Colour Recipe doesn’t.

Colour Recipe is about two hairdressers with opposite personalities: Shoukichi is introverted and awkward, whereas Fukusuke is charming and seductive. The two constantly clash, until a sequence of events where Shoukichi ends up attracting a stalker, which breaks down a barrier between him and Fukusuke. It's a yandere story. It's not feel-good.

２．憧れた人は42歳の娼夫でした

Japanese difficulty: ♥︎♥︎♥︎♥︎♡

A doctor, your boss, even your father… Dandy will be whoever you want him to be. He’s a pro at his job and nothing can shake him— that is, until a figure from his past turns up one day.

This is the only one-shot manga in this list, and also the only one without a drama CD, so you know I'm serious about how good it is. This got under my skin in the best possible way. It's got everything: yakuza, unrequited love, desperately painful moments, and cathartic reconciliation. And daddy issues!! So many daddy issues.

Dark, sordid, and very sexy, the story is so cleverly put together and every new revelation is like a punch to the gut. A masterwork of a single volume.

1. 囀る鳥は羽ばたかない/ Twittering Birds Never Fly

Japanese difficulty: ♥︎♥︎♥︎♥︎♥︎

Now I've got to my absolute favourite, I almost feel like my words have dried up. Let me try my best to do it justice.

This is a gritty series about a charismatic young yakuza boss and his unlikely relationship with his mysterious, stoic bodyguard. Yashiro is a man moulded by the abuse he faced in childhood, now a hardened and misanthropic gangster who deftly juggles his yakuza business commitments with his one solace: masochistic casual sex, the riskier and more degrading the better. When disgraced ex-cop Doumeki comes into his life, Yashiro finds him an interesting novelty: Doumeki is impotent, and therefore can't help him scratch the itch he usually requires of his subordinates, but maybe for that very reason, he feels able to get emotionally close to him.

It's a story about adults with baggage, a complicated and ambitious tale that can't be reduced to simplistic tropes. Expect angst, unhealthy relationships, violence, and traumatic backstories: I really recommend you check it out!

This is also my favourite drama CD of all time, by a long way, as well. Shingaki Tarusuke’s performance as Yashiro is by turns heart-breaking, cynical, and touching.

Thank you for reading this far! I’d love to know if your favourite is on this list, or if it gave you any new ideas for what you might read next.

A note about the difficulty ratings:

Japanese language difficulty is totally subjective, but I've rated it depending on a few factors: specialist language or jargon; puns and wordplay; unusual kanji; length of sentences; and nonstandard grammar or speech patterns which are hard to look up. 囀る鳥 has all of these, but it didn't stop me trying to tackle it when I was a Japanese beginner anyway. It just took me a lot of passes to decipher everything. Niyama-sensei likes to use puns and hard kanji in 僕のおまわりさん, but no one in her books is slurring words together like the yakuza bosses in 囀る, so I think it's relatively easier to tackle. I lent on the drama CDs hard to help with comprehension in the beginning— reading while listening really makes a difference!

Well, kind of guaranteed. There needs to be one enormous prerequisite, which is that you actually want to be learning the language in the first place. I think sometimes people confuse a slump (a temporary setback, a loss of direction, a stalling in progress) with the gnawing ache of the pervasive feeling that actually, they don't want to be doing what they're doing at all. If your initial gut response to that previous sentence is “What! Of course I want to be learning this language! I LOVE this language!” then I am very optimistic there'll be something that'll work for dragging you out of your slump in this post. Please treat it more as a menu rather than a to-do list, picking what seems interesting and discarding the rest.

1. Seek the input of other learners.

Specifically, learners who are on a trajectory that you want to aim for. Be picky about who you take advice from, but if you see someone doing what you want to be doing, it’s worth looking at how they got there and maybe readjusting your approach based on what you learn from them. It also can be heartening to talk to more advanced learners about their slumps and how they prevailed.

If you're lucky enough to be surrounded by a bunch of smart and accomplished learners already, then pick their brains! (I hear there's a lot of them on the 別次元の図書館 bookclub discord...) If you are approaching a more advanced learner on social media who you're not already friends with, it helps to have a specific question to ask. Lots of language learners LOVE to talk about their journey, but if you're too vague (“How do I learn Japanese?”) then it doesn't really feel like you're respecting their time, because you're making them have to be Sherlock Holmes in order to figure out what you're really asking. Try to hone in on a single useful question.

You could also do a bit of sleuthing, and stalk the social media of learners you admire: a lot of people record their journeys on blogs, instagram, or elsewhere. For example, if you want to excel in the JLPT, you could check out what Natha did. Or, if your dream is to read hundreds of novels in Japanese, you should totally take a deep dive into Manda's blog. Use this to help you formulate a plan forward.

2. Look back at evidence from your journey.

If you've recorded your own language learning up to this point on social media, scroll back and take solace in the fact that slumps happen, and you've got through them before. It's all peaks and valleys, baby. I'm pretty sure my first slump was inbetween learning hiragana and katakana. I felt like I'd already achieved something momentous and was galled at the idea of having to do it all over again. But we prevail, we always do.

3. Do stuff in the language totally unmeasured and off the record.

This is a great antidote to tracking fatigue, if you've been micromanaging yourself with timers and statistics. In my great Slump Of Summer 2022, when I first wrote the prototype of this post, I chose this point to start playing Final Fantasy XV in Japanese, not worrying about grasping every word, just enjoying driving around and killing monsters with the bros. Not thinking about gains. No sentence mining. So refreshing!!

Similarly, now could be a great time to crack open something immersion-wise that you've not "allowed" yourself to do before. What's the worst that could happen?

4. Revisit something that you did right at the beginning.

In aforementioned SoS 2022, I went back and reread the first couple of manga that I ever logged on bookmeter. I knew logically I would have improved but the difference in the reading experience was like night and day, and it was a big confidence boost. And wow, I was so proud of beginner-me for trying so hard! Depending on what stage you're at, this could mean revisiting your first ever Anki cards, looking at your first page of wobbly kana in your exercise book, or re-reading the graded reader that gave you such trouble in the past. Hell, maybe even going back to the first unit of Duolingo if that's where you started. There is always progress, even when it doesn't feel like it.

5. Start a new project

Embark on a new project to get you back in touch with why you love the language. This could mean signing up for a challenge that already exists: like tadoku, or a 150 days of reading challenge, or it could be something you come up with yourself. The Slump of Summer 2022 led to me wanting to do something crazy, which was try to read the first six 無職転生 novels, even though I barely had any novel reading under my belt at this time, and had failed at reading the first one before. I posted about my outlandish idea on social media, and was so surprised that others wanted to join me— some more advanced readers, some confident beginners, some inbetween. At that point I had no idea that one random outlandish idea, and one instagram story, would turn into the 別次元の図書館 bookclub, which now has nearly 250 members! Generally "making things social" is a good tool for most problems, whether that problem's motivation, accountability, or just a lack of direction. Reading alongside people is the most fun I've ever had. We help each other solve problems when we're struggling, we slate the bad reads and we get hyped about the excellent reads. All the time making Japanese gains.

Although, I do have a confession to make. I still haven't read all six of those 無職転生 volumes I said I would... but I've enjoyed plenty of other marvellous things in Japanese in these last two years.

Good luck with your journeys!! I'm rooting for you! I'd love to hear if you have any advice or perspectives from when you've dealt with similar situations: of feeling defeated, uninspired, or unsure of how to progress.

Note:

This was originally an instagram post from 2022. I'm rewriting some of my favourite instagram posts, the ones that I think are still useful or worthwhile, so that hopefully they can be helpful to a new audience. While it was always a fun exercise to try to trim down my writing to fit the barbaric character limit, it's nice having a bit of space to play with now, so I can expand on the points much more. Thank you for following me to substack if we're instagram friends. I feel very grateful for you!

I picked this novel up from Kindle Unlimited on a total whim: I recognised the cover artist from 美しい彼 so I perused the description, and the blurb was so utterly insane I knew I had to read it immediately. I hadn't heard of the author before: she is currently known as 一滴しぃ, after changing her penname from Si in 2023.

Our protagonist Misaki's mother was murdered when he was only a teenager. She was an acclaimed chef, who doted on him, and had taught him cooking techniques since he was a tiny child. Due to a ghoulish, pushy reporter plying him with particulars, after her death, Misaki learnt more chilling facts, including the detail that the killer cooked and ate his mother's body, and described it as "especially delicious". Misaki is 30 now, but ever since, has never been able to get emotionally or physically close to anyone, and finds skin-to-skin touch unbearably repulsive. He's also haunted by unsettling recurring dreams of being a tiny featherless pigeon in his mother's tender hands, and his mother slaughtering him, but strangely feeling no fear.

Despite his neuroses, Misaki has blossomed into a talented chef, and is successfully running his mother's French restaurant. One evening, while preparing a sauce, he cuts himself and spills a tiny amount of his own blood into the saucepan. Distracted, he accidentally serves the contaminated sauce to a table including a visiting food writer. While reeling from realising his grave mistake, close to fainting from panic, the food writer Kiriya rushes into the kitchen to catch him and grabs Misaki's hands close, heaping gushing praise upon him, telling him that the meal was the best he'd ever had. The hand holding makes Misaki feel things he's never felt before... a heady mixture of disgust, and...? Well, he's not sure yet. Kiriya is so taken with the meal that he wants to write a feature on Misaki's restaurant for a magazine, and he won't take no for an answer.

What follows is a heady, erotic whirlwind, as Misaki awakens to long-dormant feelings. In modern parlance, I think it would be fair to say that Kiriya and Misaki "match each other's freak", but as the story goes on, a darkness swells inside Misaki to a point where it becomes unignorable, and there's one line Kiriya just won't cross.

The author balances the grotesque with the tender in an eerie interplay, a deep rich romance with a streak of suspenseful crime fiction. Food metaphors are laced throughout the story, the bloody viscera of meat contrasted with the fluids of sensuality. As a vegetarian, the imagery was particularly shocking, but I think that 一滴しぃ 先生 wanted us to feel this revulsion at confronting our own cognitive dissonance in the case that the reader was a meat-eater: that the flesh of a flayed animal has only a paper-thin difference to that of a human.

I loved this novel so much! I'm so glad I picked it up, because it is truly exactly my type of thing. It was delightfully, refreshingly different from other horror BLs I've read, because instead of an outside enemy or even a paranormal force being the main antagonist, the madness emerges slowly from within Misaki himself as the story progresses, with every gut-wrenching development hitting the reader with a sickening inevitability. While I think it is a horror, it also has a strange gentleness to it, which is hard to describe. There are moments of domesticity portrayed which are really quite beautiful.

When I started reading the book, I thought "I have Misaki sussed out. He's like Shirotani from Ten Count", but by the end I felt like a better comparison (although still inadequate) would be to Slow Damage's Towa... or perhaps to one of Towa's Euphoria clients? Really he's a new kind of creature entirely. If you've read a BL with a protagonist like this, I want to know about it.

It was also really, really sexy, probably the most erotic book I've ever read. The author plays so delicately with her choice of language, and portrays Misaki's desires in such a vivid, reverberating way. This is complemented with the elegant gracefulness of Kasai Rikako's illustrations.

Finishing this meant I also got to fill in a square in my BL Bingo! I designed this on a whim last month with all my favourite tropes. I'm doing novels for mine, but if you want to join me and use the board for manga, or even VNs, please feel free! Here's a blank.

All the prompts are from (or loosely adapted from) chil-chil tags, so that’s a good place to look for inspiration. If you do happen to use the bingo board, tag me or tell me about it!! I'd love to know what you're reading!

I thought I'd start with a bit of an overview of my Japanese learning story, because I've never talked about this all in one place before, and I always find it really interesting to read other people's. This is a long one!

きっかけ

It would be disingenuous to suggest that it started in any other place than it did. In autumn 2018, after seeing way too much fanart of Kiryu and Majima kissing on tumblr, I started playing Yakuza 0. I instantly loved the game's mixture of gritty violent gangster life, mixed with whimsical side quests and karaoke. The characters were compelling and the combat immensely satisfying. But the thing that really grabbed me was the world. Set in fictionalised versions of Kabukicho and Dotonbori, the streets and shops were lovingly rendered, with details right down to plates of food in the windows of the restaurants. Although I was playing the English translation of the game, I was still surrounded by Japanese every time I played; neon signs emblazoning the red-light district, kanji on the vending machines, and of course the voices of the characters. Kiryu's reassuring baritone embedded itself into my consciousness, even though I couldn't understand a word he was saying. I had enjoyed Japanese media before— in fact the Yakuza game series bears a lot of resemblance to something else I used to be obsessed with, which is the world of Japanese pro wrestling— but for some reason nothing had lit a fire under me like this before, enough to want to take the plunge and start learning the language.

序盤

For the next year I fumbled around a lot. I learnt the kana okay, old school style with physical flashcards. Then I started Genki, but I found it impossible to concentrate on it. I heard Japanese from Zero was easier, so I bought that too, but when it got to the section on counters, I felt so breathtakingly stupid that I gave up on that too. I did a bit of an app called LingoDeer, on-and-off. And I'd watch some learning YouTube videos occasionally. But I couldn't stick to anything, and I felt overwhelmed all the time. Textbooks made me miserable, so I started to dread learning. I was "studying" alongside my then-boyfriend, who had three years of Japanese at university under his belt (granted, it was ten years ago, and he hadn't touched the language since, but the knowledge was still rattling around in there), so while it should have been motivating to have a study partner, I just felt inferior all the time that he could "get" things that I couldn't.

In the end the only thing I found that I enjoyed and I could do consistently was Wani Kani. I did that most days in 2019 and managed to learn about 1000 kanji all while still not grasping N5 level grammar. Still, somehow, I scraped a pass at the N5 exam in December 2019. I also tried reading manga for the first time around then, and looking back it was obvious why I couldn't understand anything, but I felt like "I know all these kanji, why can't I make sense of the sentences?"

ひらめき時代

I had planned to continue plodding along on the same trajectory, and wanted to take the N4 in December 2020, but of course, the pandemic happened, so the JLPT was off the cards. When lockdown dragged on, two pivotal things happened: I discovered BL drama CDs on SoundCloud (of manga which I had already read fanslated previously) and I found videos by Matt Vs Japan on YouTube talking about immersion learning. During our lockdown-permitted "daily exercise" walks, I would stomp round the park listening to these drama CDs on repeat; picking out the words that I knew, sometimes pulling out my phone to look up a word in the dictionary, and just letting the rest of it wash over me. In the evenings I would read the AJATT website (now sadly defunct) that was recommended by Matt Vs Japan, and read the outlandish tales of a man who attained fluency in Japanese in only 18 months while having fun the entire time. It should probably be disclaimered here that Matt vs Japan has scrubbed most of his useful content from the internet these days and is preferring to tout his scammy online tutoring courses, despite the fact that's not the way he learnt at all. But the man's abrasive personality and opportunism aside, it can't be overstated the effect that finding his three hour "AJATT journey" YouTube video had on me. It really made me believe that learning Japanese without textbooks was possible— and even more effective.

I really wanted to connect with other people to talk about learning Japanese, and also share my progress, so that was when I created my Instagram account. These ideas about immersion were ticking around my brain, but I was still frustrated by the fact I could barely understand anything, so I was in a limbo state. I tried to mimic the other people I saw on studygram by picking up apps and textbooks again, but my heart wasn’t in it.

However, in September 2020, I met Julianne, who was a likeminded Japanese learner-- enthusiastic about immersion but disillusioned by the toxicity of some of the other immersion learning spaces. We talked every day for a few weeks and eventually she confessed her desire to somehow recreate the positivity of a Japanese immersion camp she visited when she was at school. From this idea, we co-created Minimmersion, and its accompanying discord server: an every-other-month challenge to immerse in your target language for an entire weekend. The first Minimmersion was in November 2020, and even with my limited comprehension, I had fun trying things I'd never done before: reading Japanese wrestling magazines, playing Pokemon in Japanese, and watching my favourite anime Banana Fish with no English subtitles. It was also amazing making new female friends who were passionate about the idea of immersion. Although Julianne and I ended up parting ways in the middle of 2021, and I left the Minimmersion project in her capable hands, I still feel proud of the community we created together.

闘志時代

From January 1st 2021, I got serious. That was the day I started an Anki streak which ended up lasting over 1250 days. I was determined to drag my shaky foundation of Japanese up to where I could start immersing and enjoying it. For the next 90 days I had a three-pronged approach: vocab, grammar, and kanji every day. For vocab I did 10 cards of the Tango N4 deck evey day: I already knew most of the N5 vocab from Wani Kani. For grammar I watched one of Japanese Ammo With Misa's Absolute Beginner’s Grammar playlist videos with my dinner every night, and made Anki cards from the example sentences she used. For kanji, I repped a recognition RTK deck at a quite aggressive pace just so I had all of the jouyou under my belt-- I knew their faces, even if I didn't know how to read them in words yet. I also was immersing and sentence mining— I was super into Final Fantasy XV at this point, but the game was too hard for me to play in Japanese, so I sentence mined any i+1 sentences I could find from the anime (or from doujin).

Going so hardcore for a relatively short sprint paid massive dividends. I read my first proper manga, and then my next one, then my next. I was enjoying the stories and getting the jokes! In March 2021 I started playing my first visual novel-- Brothers Conflict (which I would highly recommend for beginners), and then in April I read my first light novel, which was a Brothers Conflict novelisation. In July I read my first "grown up" novel, コンビニ人間、alongside listening to the audiobook, and heavily relying on yomichan. Even though I needed to do lots of lookups, the wins were coming thick and fast. Alongside all this I was sentence mining every day, mostly from anime: I did Junjou Romantica, Free!!, Ouran Host Club, Horimiya, and a bunch of others. Making high quality Anki cards with pictures and audio made my cards fun to rep, and I looked forward to doing Anki every day. I also had the satisfaction of seeing the words I'd mined in other places almost immediately.

At some point towards the end of the year I also started making monolingual cards with Japanese definitions, which was another big milestone.

There were still setbacks all the time, of course. In September I set out to read all of Death Note, which I struggled through at around 6 hours per volume for the first three volumes before declaring defeat, I just couldn't grasp the dialogue. I started lots of things I couldn't finish: like the キノの旅 novel. But I kept trying things and chipping away. In October, I hit 50 volumes of manga read. In November, I finished my first full-length visual novel, Dramatical Murder, which was a dizzying high.

図書館時代

2022 started out as more of the same. The Anki streak continued, the sentence cards continued to increase, hitting 5000 in April. I played the visual novels Sweet Pool and Amnesia, and finally finished all the routes in Brothers Conflict. In March I logged my 100th manga read, thanks to getting into series like Ten Count and Caste Heaven. I played Fire Emblem Awakening in Japanese, which felt like a long-held dream coming true.

While I was immersing happily all of the time, and reading manga was mostly no problem, I still found novels hard and time consuming, and felt insecure about this weakness. My reading speed was glacial and my grammar still had lots of gaps. In July I felt I was heading into a slump. I wasn't improving as fast as I had been for all of 2021, and it felt like a roadblock.

I did a bunch of different things to get over this slump (and I want to write more about that at a later point!) but the most impactful one was deciding, after binging the anime in one frenzied weekend, that I wanted to read the first 6 無職転生 novels. This was a fairly outlandish challenge, being that I had given up on more novels than I'd read at this point, but I felt buoyed by enjoying the anime so much, and determined to show myself that I could make progress again. I figured that by the end of those six books, I'd HAVE to be good at reading novels. It was inevitable, like all the other progress I'd made. So I blurted this plan out on instagram stories, as is my wont, and was surprised that a few other people wanted to join me. I started a group chat to discuss the books, but quickly hit the member limit, so it led to a discord server; which for the first few months of its life was called "Mushoku readalong". However, as it grew, we discussed reading other books together, and so it turned into a general light novel bookclub. It's now called 別次元の図書館 and has nearly 250 members.

Friends have been the most important and wonderful part of this whole journey. I feel so lucky to be surrounded by such smart, cool people, both on instagram and in the bookclub. I've even been fortunate enough to get the chance to meet a few of them offline, and nerd out about Japanese stuff in person. Because I live with chronic illness, a lot of things are challenging for me, especially travelling-- so visiting Japan itself remains a distant dream, but in a way I feel like I've been able to bring Japan to me, through immersion.

The bookclub quickly turned into a Japanese learning space that really felt like home to me, which I hadn't felt since the early days of Minimmersion. I'd tried other big discord servers: like Refold, The Moe Way, and JPDB, but their vibes were off and I never felt welcome. In the bookclub I think we've managed to foster an atmosphere that is both encouraging and productive. You should totally come check out the read we have planned for September!

I also need to specifically shout out Powz here for being a massive supporter of the bookclub and helping to cultivate it being such a cool place, as well as thank her for our DM conversations in that Slump Summer that helped me forge a path forward. She's a very good friend, and I'm very lucky to know her.

一万文時代

2023 meant more books, more visual novels, and my reading speed gradually increasing. It was not unusual to be reading at 5k characters an hour while struggling with Mushoku back in Summer 2022, but in Autumn 2023 I hit 20k characters an hour for the first time while reading the visual novel Re:Birthday Song with the bookclub (we expanded into visual novels after a brainstorming session I had with the wonderful Jun in August 2023).

In September 2023 I reached the 10,000 sentence cards goal which Khatzumoto outlined on the AJATT website as being the secret guaranteed path to Japanese fluency. The 10k cards represented hundreds of hours of immersion: of novels, games, VNs, manga, VTubers, drama CDs, doujin and magazines. It also aligned with my 1000 day streak of Anki. I had turned up every single day for nearly three years. I certainly didn't feel fluent!! But I was seriously happy with how far I'd come. The simple idea that I just needed to collect 10k sentences had pulled me through these 1000 days, following my curiosity, having fun. And It turned every Japanese media I interacted with into a learning resource.

After this, I slowed down a bit with sentence mining, but I still use Anki for loads of things, and I can't recommend it enough.

Honestly, it was eclipsed by the enormous quantity of good things that happened that year, but it'd probably be remiss of me not to mention that in December 2023 I sat the N1, my first JLPT exam since I took N5 in 2019. Unfortunately, I failed, which was pretty on track with what I expected from my mocks. I felt like perhaps I might be one of those cases of people who pass N1 with no problem from immersion alone, but it wasn't enough for me. I felt a bit sorry for myself for a while, but weighing it up, it wasn't really important at all, and I'll try again some time.

そして、今

Well, this year isn't over yet, but a few things that have happened so far: I started thinking about output more seriously, after one lone disastrous iTalki lesson the previous year. Talking isn't an enormous priority to me, but I still felt the urge to want to be able to express myself in Japanese, and Powz felt the same, so I turned her idea of a 100 days of output challenge into a channel in the bookclub. I still am super wobbly with output, but I'm improving slowly through journaling and writing posts on Journaly.

In April I summoned a bit of that crazy fighting spirit from the start of my proper journey in 2021, and hit the textbooks hard for Accountability April, intending to have a revenge run at the N1 in December this year. Unfortunately, I later found out that my nearest test centre isn't intending to host the JLPT this year, so that plan is scuppered for the time being. However, I do feel like that 30 days of intense grammar, listening, and reading study has helped me in general, especially with comprehension and reading speed.

In May I won my first Tadoku contest, after competing in it semi regularly since November 2020!

I've already read 36 novels in Japanese so far this year, and I can officially say I've beaten my demons with regard to novel-reading. There've been so many things I've enjoyed reading this year, from the amazing prison drama novel Deadlock to the theological horror visual novel Shin Gakkou. I don't plan on slowing down any time soon!

This October, I’m turning 35, and it’ll be six years since I first started learning kana. Looking back, there are lots of ways I could have done things differently— I could have started a lot earlier, I could have worked harder in the beginning. But all in all, things worked themselves out. I’m happy with where I am and proud of where I’ve come from.

If you've read this far, thank you so much!