jibun zukare by hiroki kashiragi
This is the first time I'm writing a review for this blog, which makes it the first "formal" blog I've written in quite a lot while. Different iterations have existed in the past and I used to write short stuff on Goodreads, but I haven't in a long time—I was too stuck on formatting. Honestly though, I can't really think of a better book to start with than Jibun Zukare by Hiroshi Kashiragi, a book I read over just two days. It was just so good.
In essence, this book is about what it means to be "you" and how tiring that can be. It's the first book in a series called Aida de Kangaeru ("thinking in-between"?), with the in-between for this book between that of body and spirit*. He does this mostly by talking about literature (including manga, nonfiction, etc.). There are also some references to TV shows and movies. He begins by asking us to think about if we (in other words, our "self") are our body or our spirit and gradually breaks that question down even further until the last chapter of the book, where he aims to reassemble everything that has been broken down in the previous chapters.
I really liked this book for a lot of reasons. First of all, the style is just extremely approachable. Since all the books in the series are meant to be enjoyed by teenagers too (my library seems to file them in a nebulous Japanese version of a YA section), difficult concepts are written in a really clear way. There are also exciting illustrations and bold/coloured text throughout to make important points clearer. It's really obvious a lot of care went into the contents of the book as well as the design, which made the reading experience a lot more fun.
I also just really liked the theme of the book and the way that the Kashiragi decided to approach it. It's explicitly said in the author bio and the author brings it up throughout the book, but he has severe inflammatory bowel disease. This is the only book by him that I've read and I hadn't heard of him before, but it seems that his case is pretty serious. Because the book spends a lot of time talking about body vs. spirit and how that affects our sense of self, it added another important layer to the discussion. Our perceptions (or lack thereof) change through injuries, or in his case, severe chronic illness, so obviously it's something worth considering when discussing where "we" (our self/spirit/whatever you want to call it) are actually located. He also points out that we don't really think about most aspects of our bodies until something bad happens—personal experience agrees. He expands on this by also talking about how its not just our own perceptions of our self that matter, but those of society (aka other people) as well.
I'm very into this method of approaching philosophy of the self and had a great time reading the book. I got to add several books cited by the author to my TBR and felt incredibly seen as someone with an entirely different, but also high burden chronic illness (several actually, but anyway). If you can read in Japanese, I really recommend reading Jibun Zukare. The theme is really worth thinking about and it's also just a great way to read some nonfiction in Japanese and polish those skills at the same time.
*I translated the author's use of ココムhere (note the katakana) as "spirit," despite being unconvinced of its adequacy for the task at hand, mostly out of convenience. This is a casual review of a book I really liked and spending hours agonizing on how to translate the idea of ココムinto English without stepping on the toes of a specific point made in the book (that different words can be used to describe this "self" and that they don't all in fact mean exactly the same thing) feels counterintuitive to the exercise (sharing my feelings on a cool book I read) at this time. I may come up with a solution at some point and update the entry accordingly. Or I won't. We'll see.
Updated 9Â months, 4Â weeks ago