'How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart'

Bought a hard copy in support of the author, but I also got a digital copy because I didn't want to have to wait to read it. Heh. Digital copies are available in Mobi and EPUB. The hard copies aren't arriving from UK that fast, notwithstanding the expedited shipping I paid for. That's Tokyo-based Florentyna Leow's 'How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart' (2023). 

Published by The Emma Press, the book is filled with stories of the author's experiences as a tour guide in her early years in Japan, and the two years spent in Kyoto. Readers are reminded of the over-churned tourism industry in Kyoto, and are taken to have glimpses of Florentyna Leow's personal life experiences in the city before she moved back to Tokyo, and became a writer. She now writes full-time and shares updates via IG. 

The collection of 12 short stories shared vignettes of Kyoto. The author talked about why she left Tokyo for Kyoto, and why she ditched Kyoto and moved back to Tokyo. She met people, made friends, got a life partner along the way. But she also grappled with the loss of a sort of long-term friendship during the two years in Kyoto.

The first story is titled 'Persimmons' and reminisces about this lost friendship. The author moved from Tokyo to Kyoto, and worked with a friend from university. So they were colleagues and also housemates in this single storey house. Her room in a shared house looked at to Mt Hiel in the distance. The house had a maple tree, and a persimmon tree. She had so many memories of cooking with persimmons, just so not to let the fruit go to waste — jam, chutney, custard, and dried them as hoshigaki, vinegar, anything. 

It was the first time I had lived up close with an actual fruit tree. The autumn bounty felt miraculous and impossible, these mounds of beautiful imperfect fruits with their bruises and webs of blemishes, so different from perfectly square supermarket persimmons suffocating in their plastic prisons. Without any effort the tree simply grew, year after year, a gift unasked for. It felt a bit like my life: a job, a friend, a tree, a roof over my head, all of these things I hadn’t asked for but had received like a benediction. It took years to stop feeling guilty for all this good fortune.  

A year and half later, this friend and roommate quite her job and left the country. The author assumed they would stay friends. But they didn't. The persimmon tree had been cut down to make way for a studio, and the friend-roommate never got in touch again. The author too, never quite ate persimmons the way she did again. 

It occurs to me, as I write these words, that I still have two bottles of persimmon vinegar in my pantry. They travelled with me to Tokyo in a large paper bag, and the vinegar is now a five year-old vintage, rust-coloured, rich and mellow. This is what I have left of the house, the tree, and of her.

She talked about her favorite shōtengai (商店街) in Kyoto and the stores in there, a dimly-lit jazz kissaten with questionable standards of coffee, her most disliked restaurants and temples, and even Arashiyama. None of these places are designed to host the large numbers of tourists visiting today.

It's quite an enjoyable read, absorbing all the things that she's saying, framed into vignettes. Writing these earlier and then sitting on it for a few years, and then revisiting them again make for a different sort of reflection, methinks. She could think about her years in Kyoto, and of course, the one lost friendship that still hurts when talked about today. It's still raw to her.  

The last chapter is titled 'Egg Love'. I don't know how the author tied eggs to love. But I suppose I see it. "We leave broken eggshells behind us all the time; the point is to make them count." In her mind, eggs are happy things, but eggshells aren't quite it. 

There’s no love quite like egg love.

I’m talking about knowing how someone likes their eggs. Do you really know someone if you can’t say whether they prefer eggs fried or poached? My father loves his quick omelettes, cracked straight into the wok and flash-stirred until just tender, streaked yellow and white. His ideal half-boiled egg has whites slightly firm and cooked but a gooey yolk; my mother’s is closer to three-quarters than half. Mine is closer to onsen tamago, as is my older sisters’; but I douse mine with lashings of white pepper and too much soy sauce. My sisters and I watch in fascinated horror as our youngest sibling stirs hers until uniformly coloured, not a trace of white permitted to remain. A half-boiled egg tells you everything you need to know about a person.