Hi, my name is Tomomi.

Went for a last-minute trip to London to join my UK-based Gestalt peers for some fun weekend plans.

Got my Build project site in pretty good shape. It’s fun to update too, so I think I’ll actually be able to sustain its use. Once I make a bit more progress with some key projects, I will send out a Postcard.

We finally had some sun in Paris, enough that I took an anti-histamine pill to combat the pollen. The whole city felt like it was in good spirits. I’d become a bit too immersed in coding, though. I felt its affect in my sleep, eyesight, short term memory and the way people reacted to how I talked about my experiments and ideas. I had the good sense to call a coach friend for a session—their genuine concern for my wellbeing broke through my jittery stupor, and I put Claude Code aside for three days, to help me start recalibrating. It’s been weird.

I got back to books, too. I figured the easiest way to break the streak would be to pick up a soft, pleasing novel. Yasushi Kitagawa’s “ The Lucky Ride ” did the trick. I started journaling again, leafed through some of my zines and finished Pierre Bayard’s “ How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read ”. I even went for a bike ride for the first time since autumn (taking the Velib around town doesn’t count) and the last piece to bring back will be to get back in the rock climbing gym. I’ll do that tomorrow/Monday.

This week, I spent all my time building apps with Claude Code. It’s a very strange feeling, to have my software engineering years in my 20s merge with my product design experience, and to have access to all of that (and more) through a “coding assistant”. On the seventh day, I started running a fever—a literal sign that my brain was being fried. Caught up in fever dreams, and trying to wrap my mind around the implications of what I was learning. I’ve started putting out feelers to find “safer” containers for the exploration, so there are other people involved, there are projects, and it’s more integrated in my professional activities.

I went for two coffee+walks along the Canal, attended Dancing Voice/Singing Body workshops (online) from Meredith Monk/The House Foundation for the Arts, and spent an afternoon sauntering through a forest. But I read no books and didn’t journal at all this week, so that’s where my Monday shall start.

I went to see the exhibition L’empire du sommeil at Musée Marmottan Monet, which had some nice pieces but felt like an unserious attempt at tackling a rich theme like sleep. It didn’t explore dreams, day dreams or napping at all. And there were a few too many pieces that were “man/god looking at nude, sleeping female“ to which I had a heightened awareness of, as our visit was the same day that former prince Andrew was arrested. Still, a museum visit and light dinner afterwards is such a wonderful way to spend a weekday evening and I’m determined to repeat it soon.

A big week for Emotions at Work, as we kickoff a multi-month engagement with a new client. I was reminded yet again how energizing it is to spend time with open-hearted clients that seek partnership to make a dent in their aspirations.

I finally took a proper plunge into vibe coding, and got from point A - hey here’s an idea to point B - hey here’s the URL of my app, try it out. Yes, I got as far as hooking up a Github repo, Vercel, and Supabase so that I can deploy web apps with a database backend. It’s been a lot of fun and I’m liking the learning curve. I think I can become much better, very quickly, and then see how useful that is…!

I worked on two apps:

• An learning app that helps increase fluency with a Gestalt framework that I’ve been having retention issues with—I generated exercises, and designed a chatbot that acts as a teacher. It’s laser focused on helping you learn the material, and doesn’t try to analyze you or “support” you, which is an issue with a generic LLM experience. My goal is to make a couple of single-purpose learning apps under the umbrella of Gestalter for me and my peers. This is a very good start!
• A whiteboard tool for a workshop activity that we often run at Emotions at Work, for which I have not been able to find a sufficient workaround for in Miro or Figma. There are still technical challenges to be overcome but I’m more and more optimistic that I can build something we can use ourselves. Once I’m there, we’ll explore the possibility of releasing it as a paid service. This is a much more ambitious app than a Claude API wrapper, and I’m mindblown at how far I got just sitting on my couch on the weekend.

I had three outings, so not in complete cave mode, but close to it. Mostly I did what was needed for work, and then just read book after book.

• Kaho Nashiki’s “ The Witch of the West is Dead ”. It’s a short novel of a troubled young girl who goes to live with her grandmother in the forest for a while, where she learns the ways of a witch, gaining fluency in plants and animals and attunement to self. It was a delightful, easy read, with lots of lovely phrases. There was a bonus short story after the novel—a few scenes of the main character in a period that was not covered in the book, splitting perspectives with another character who was only mentioned in passing in the main story. So you get a sense of what happened in between chapters of the main story, delivered just in that moment when you’re mourning a bit that the story has concluded. An unexpected cherry on top that I would dearly love to see more authors do!
• I skimmed Takashi Saito’s non-fiction book “ The place where only book readers can arrive ”. Saito is a well-known educator and prolific author. But I was put off by the cold and condescending tone and ended up skipping over large swaths of it.
• I read Daisuke Kishida’s “ Textbook on business for the ‘new’ wealthy “ for work.
• Shigeru Mizuki’s “ Mizuki-san’s Happiness Theory “ was a wonderful read. The first half was his thesis on happiness, and the second half was a series of autobiographical essays about his life and career. I know Mizuki as a hugely successful and beloved manga artist, and was sucked into reading his accounts on his experience as a conscripted foot soldier in WW2 and decades of struggle as a starving artist.
• Keisuke Hada’s novel “ Phantom ” was a strange one. The set-up is promising—the main character, a 32yo salaried worker obsessed with FIRE and the stock market, has to decide what to do about her boyfriend, who looks down her priorities, gets pulled into a cult that rejects the monetary economy. The story attempts to question what happiness lies beyond the pursuit of financial independence but the cult storyline felt forced and distracting. I was disappointed.
• Looking for something casual and entertaining, I read Hisato Watanabe’s “ I did an in-depth report on a historic ballet company on the verge of going under—and it was intense. ” based on his experience as a hired gun producing YouTube videos for said ballet company. The ballet company takes an incredible risk ‘letting‘ this producer set the editorial direction, as he follows his nose on what’s interesting, and gets into the personal lives of the dancers and handles taboo topics like how much money they make. Their courage and open-mindedness to try something new, because clearly the existing ways are not working, is humbling. There is no promise of success, and indeed, they get tons of criticism. But against the odds, they start selling out shows and building a new audience that had never been interested in ballet before. Incredible.

It was my first week back in Paris, but fragmented as I was catsitting for friends, and spent considerable time going back and forth between my home and theirs. I have completed this mission, though, and I look forward to re-building my daily routines. Really need to get back in the gym, it’s been almost two months.

I prototyped an essay series to introduce some of the thinking I do with the Japanese books I’m reading, in terms of how it shapes my perspectives on design, systems and relationships. The process laid bare the gap between thinking about, which I experience as enjoyable consumption, and thinking with, for which I need rigorous training. This was a daunting realization. But after tinkering with it for an afternoon, I feel energized by the challenge. It is a worthwhile mountain to climb, and it feels like I’m starting a new chapter on my journey with books.

On Saturday afternoon, I joined a workshop on resonant singing and social presencing theater practices. The singing is more like vocalizing in different group configurations, which I find a lot of fun. It’s literally about learning how to use your voice, in a playful, experimental way where there is no yardstick for good or bad singing. In the last five years, I’ve had sporadic chances to workshop SPT, this type of singing, contract improv etc. Wonder how I can make it happen more often?

My reading highlight this week was Mari Yonehara’s novel “Olga Morisovna’s Rhetorical Question”, an incredible detective tale that takes the main character (a middle-aged Japanese woman) to Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union, to unravel mysteries of the life of her Russian dance teacher (Olga Morisovna) from whom she studied under in Prague as a child. It runs the gamut of the 1930s at the height of Stalin’s power to the 1960s when those years start getting re-examined and re-constructed through public retrospection. It’s a 500 page novel that I read on my Kindle, and I’m not sure I would even have picked up if I’d realized the length beforehand. The list of Russian characters introduced at the beginning of the book was almost enough to put me off. After finishing the book, I looked at that list again and was very pleased to find that I had a sense of each character’s physicality and energy—and wished I could spend more time with them. Yonehara, who had a big career as a Japanese-Russian interpretor as well as writing novels and providing news commentary on Russian affairs, passed away from cancer in 2006 at age 56. I can’t help but mourn the role she may have played in helping the public understand present-day developments.

• Monday: Morning hike in Kirstenboch with M, an afternoon of journaling, and a last dinner with M and K
• Tuesday: Cable car up to Table Mountain for a meandering walk, picked up a bunch of South African novels at an indie bookstore, sent a Postcard
• Wednesday: Up at 5am to get back to Paris, a 12hr flight. Read Wisani Mushwana’s “ Soft Landing ” and Damon Galgut’s “ The Promise ”
• Thursday: Back to work
• Friday: Some work, Korean resto dinner with M and early night in
• Saturday: Did loads of laundry and cleaned my apartment. Read Kopano Matlwa’s “ Bosadi ” and Sayaka Murata’s “ Convenience Store Woman “. Started a week of cat sitting for friends
• Sunday: Read some of the zines I’d picked up in Tokyo. Hang out with A and the cat

I’m very glad I bit the bullet and upgraded my phone before going to South Africa! What an incredible country. Wonder how I can get back?

A crazy intense week where I barely blinked. It’s Sunday and my training is officially finished. We learned about resistance, conflict, and dyadic systems—and by learn I mean, we practiced with and on each other in different configurations, and with organizational clients. On two nights I stayed till the end of dinner parties, an on two other nights I crashed without any dinner at all. I got a light bout of gastro and handled it well. I celebrated my birthday with my peers, feeling bashful and pleased. I had a joyous reunion with a friend for the first time in-person, after five years of Zoom connections. She and her daughter drove me to the Cape of Good Hope and introduced me to views all along the coast. I visited Robben Island, most know as the place where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 17 years, but also for keeping many other political prisoners and leprosy patients in isolation.

Yesterday I saw this sign painted on the back of a bus: “too blessed to be stressed”. Feeling a bit like that!

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.

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.

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..!

I kicked off work on Tuesday, starting with a nice team lunch and commuting to the office every day. It’s a run of what my life may have looked like if I hadn’t moved away, which I always find to be a marvelous, confusing mix of bittersweetness, nostalgia and gratitude.

Fun things that happened:

• went to the largest zine shop in Tokyo and then a zine festival the next day — lots of wonderful finds!
• lunch with peers and friends visiting from Singapore
• coffee with a fellow UXR who is great about making sure we meet :)
• meals at three restaurants that manage to evade or repel tourists
• two conveyor belt sushi dinners who do not
• Friday izakaya drinking party with childhood friends
• got a tattoo! I have a few weeks left in my milestone birthday year to do it and pretty happy with the result
• last round of shopping (clothes, food, cosmetics) before flying back to Tokyo
• a last hang with baby niece, even babysitting solo for a while and successfully putting her down for a nap