Week 3, 2026 — arrived in Capetown
I needed to be in South Africa on Saturday and I’d decided to spend a few days in Paris first, to re-pack and re-connect. It was wonderful to be home and hard to leave. Sometimes I wonder how much I really love travelling. I can’t imagine not doing it but I’m also a huge homebody.
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I read Ryo Asai’s novel “In the Mega-church” from Tokyo to Paris. It’s an intricate story of three characters that criss-cross into a finale—a divorced salaryman desperate for relevance who gets an opportunity to help market an idol group, his socially isolated university student daughter who gets sucked into this fandom unbeknownst to him, and a financially precarious 35 yo woman whose world collapses when her favorite idol commits suicide. Their three stories advanced in leaps and bounds bigger than I anticipated, by which I mean, their lives deteriorated at a speed which is horrifying and at the same time, feels like a logical sequence for what happens when one loses their place in community and latches onto something that isolates them even further. Asai is know for his ability to capture the zeitgeist with surgical precision of the inner experience of different players on that scene. It’s suffocating and relentless and you can’t look away.
On my way from Paris to Capetown I read Asako Yuzuki’s novel, “Butter”. (In the original Japanese, having learned from “Before the coffee gets cold”). I’d actually heard about this book from an Australian friend, before realizing that it’d been a bestseller in the UK. Translated contemporary novels are having a moment in the English book market, it seems. I was blown away by the prose in this book… there were sentences that felt so rich, so savory. Now that I know what happens, I can re-read it more slowly in the future to savor the nuances and turn of phrases. This book has some beautiful friendships, which was like a salve after In the Mega-Church. I also related to the impulses of many of the female characters—finding my own experiences and inner monologue articulated in a crisp manner that provided validation that I hadn’t even realized I hadn’t given to my own thoughts. I finished Butter while having breakfast on my Airbnb patio in the sun (see photo!) which felt like a grand luxury. I’m curious to read some English reviews but want to enjoy cocooning in my high-context Japanese experience a while longer.
In my jet lagged mornings in between, I read Gabrielle Zevin’s novel, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”. This was also a great book, on friendship, the world of gaming and creative processes. I’m still coming down from the heat of Butter to say more but I enjoyed this book a lot and will prob re-read it in the future, too.
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Other things happened this week, too, some wonderful conversations that will form creative projects in the near future. And I’m in South Africa, a place I’ve had little exposure to in the past. But let’s be honest, it was the books that made my week..!