May 2022

Memory of a Midnight Bookshop

During my final year at college in Tokyo, I worked part-time at a small local bookshop. The bookshop was located right next to my university campus, and since I used to live nearby, the job was a perfect fit for me. I said “local bookshop,” but that’s not quite right. Even though it was located

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Joy of Giving

This is a story that I heard from my aunt long time ago. When my aunt was little, her father was ill and in order to support the family, she and her elder brother used to help their mother with the field work and housework. On top of the heavy workload, the family finance was

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Milk!

One of the strangest, and yet clearest memories from my early childhood took place in the kitchen of my family’s tiny half-dilapidated apartment. I was two or three at the time, and I was very fond of drinking milk. When my parents and I sat for dinner, there was always a 1L milk package placed

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Oh, let’s go home.

It was in the month of May when I was nine years old. My father’s close friend from college time came to visit us with his four children over the long weekend. The day when they arrived was a beautiful sunny day, and my mother drove all of us to a park on the riverside

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Silly Competition

Throughout my childhood, I had two best friends that I always hung out with. Especially when we all lived in the same community of tiny half-dilapidated apartments, we saw each other and played together every day. Our friendship was very caring in nature and unique in the sense that we almost never competed against each

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Pretending to be a cat

When I was a child, I loved reading books. More precisely, I loved living the books. What this meant was that I often got so absorbed in my reading that I started to live my daily life feeling as if I were the hero or heroin of the story I was reading. When I was

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Dated drawings

Throughout my childhood, I was very fond of drawing, and like many other kids, I daily drew many things with my colour pens and crayons. When I was in kindergarten and crazy about Sailor Moon TV series, my drawing revolved a lot around Sailor Moon characters, and when my little brother passed away just before

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Sailing on the bedding

It was when I was five years old and lived in our family’s tiny half-dilapidated apartment. Sometime in the evening after dinner, my mother prepared a bedding for all of us in one room. It was me and my brother’s playroom during the day, but due to the limited space in the house, it turned

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