I hiked the Camino de Santiago in August/September 2025. I did the Camino Frances starting from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port over 28 days, and for anyone with the time to do it, I highly recommend it.

This page is mostly intended as a set of logistics and pro-tips for anyone actively interested in walking. It's not intended to persuade someone who's uncertain about walking (though if that would be interesting, let me know!).

Similar to my article on the Camino de Santiago, this article is primarily designed as a list of suggestions for folks who have already decided to walk the Kumano Kodo. I highly recommend it -- it's much more secluded than the Camino, and while it takes a lot more planning, it's well worth the effort.

I first watched The Tatami Galaxy anime several years ago, and it lit my brain on fire. I loved the recursive storytelling, the unique and unpredictable animation style, and the cocky-yet-downtrodden voice of the main character. So when I saw that Morimi's original novel had been translated into English, I felt I had to read it, if only because it felt like peering behind the curtain of a work I really admired.

And while I enjoyed the book, I will say that my biggest takeaway is that it made me appreciate Masaaki Yuasa's anime adaptation even more.

I have very mixed feelings here. This book is an engaging entry point to contemporary left theory (which, caveat emptor, I am not well-versed in, so take this review with that in mind) and makes valuable arguments with respect to mental health as well as the titular relationship between ideology and imagination, but I felt like much of the remainder of the work is imprecise or impressionistic in ways that I found lacking.

To be specific, many of the arguments in the latter half of the book seem to me to conflate several different diagnostic factors as roots of the “audit culture”/bureaucratic expansionism that are core to the felt experience of “centerless” corporations and purely symbolic work culture. Despite the book's title, my sense is that Fisher is arguing more specifically that these arise from the particular expression of capitalism circa 2008, not about capital-C Capitalism as an economic system. I say this because many of his diagnoses of audit culture and bureaucracy have a host of interrelated causes. One could point to, for example, financialization and the requirements of public companies to “perform work” as part of their duty to shareholders; the rise of managerialism as a practice in the latter half of the twentieth century, which went well beyond shareholder-driven corporations to happen in schools, hospitals, and so on; or even just look at natural ossification and bureaucratic development of most large organizations as complex technologies require similarly complex organizations to develop them.

When I share with people that I travel for months at a time out of a backpack, the response generally hovers somewhere between light amusement and Lovecraftian horror. It sets a constraint in a space where many people want to be unconstrained. I'm travelling, it should be relaxed. And that's precisely why you should pack light: the last thing you want is to be soaked with sweat from lugging around a heavy suitcase or awkwardly redistributing clothes to stay under the 50 pound weight limit your airline enforces.

I'm guilty of being a chronic over-packer myself, always stuck with the recurring idea that just maybe I'll need a down jacket in Hawaii or five extra pairs of underwear. It's symptomatic of my own runaway mind, constantly thinking through infinite what-if scenarios wherein I stain ten T-shirts in three days and thus absolutely must pack fifteen.

Everyone I meet is in transition. The spaces are never one's own, merely borrowed for a moment -- campgrounds, hostels, gas stations. I catch everyone, in some way or another, in their own story, in the ebb and flow of their grand journey elsewhere. I wonder what we all think we're doing here.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phatasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion, The White Album

Greetings, my dearests, from the beautiful Sequoia National Park! Couldn't ask for a better place to inaugurate this auspicious day: a newsletter is born.

I'll keep this first one brief -- I'm shooting for these to be bi-weekly, and in them will be updates on what I'm up to -- mostly all the bits and pieces that haven't explicitly made it into the travelogues, of which there are many -- and also whatever writing I've been doing in the meantime. Also possibly just some Cool Stuff that I think is worth sharing, like other folks' writing, music, film, and so on. And if you've got some cool stuff to share, send it my way! This'll all be way more casual than the writing than I usually do, and everybody gets enough email as it is, so I'll try my best to make it worth your while and to keep things brief-ish.

"I hold on to the hope that contrition is fixed within the steps of the very walk itself. Each step, an apology. A million apologies. I want to kiss the foreheads of everyone I see."

A quick story of my own before we get to the book:

Brandon Sanderson has loomed at the periphery of my literary awareness for a few years now. An author selling these massive tomes for millions of diehard fans is always someone to cheer for in my mind, and The Stormlight Archive was suggested to me personally as perhaps his greatest accomplishment. Especially after seeing one of the strangest and most un-generous articles I've ever read targeted at him, I felt personally compelled to see what books could possibly generate this much discussion.

But alas: this book left me wanting a lot more.

I saw a light flash up at me, picking me out of the midnight desert landscape. “Looks like we've got a problem,” the voice behind the light said.

Out in the desert, the mind is pulled, over and over again, back to its survival instincts. I was near the campground and dozens of visitors with food and supplies, and yet a small part of my brain was continuously calculating how much water I had, when I needed to eat, listening for new sounds: a background task that slowly syphons away my mental battery.

First stop on my Journey Across America is perhaps one of the least-National-Park-ish National Parks: Hot Springs. Hot Springs is arguably more along the lines of a historic site than a National Park. Most of the famous sites are architectural: the old colonial architecture of Bathhouse Row and The Arlington. But hey, it's an absolutely lovely place to stop by for a day or so.

I am back on the road — this time exploring these great United States, and particularly the National Parks.

I have a natural inclination to wander. It's great to spend a lot of time in a single place, to get to know its rhythms and routines, but I always feel a little spark in my chest when I get back on the move. This morning I started off down the highway, and about twenty minutes in I looked out at the tall grass along the roadside, bending in rolling waves against the wind. My body relaxed, my vision opened up to the whole landscape. Everything was right where it should be.

For the last few months, I've been traveling with nothing more than a backpack, and with space at such a premium, printed books were the first thing that had to go. But the months bore down on me and I missed the texture of the pages on my fingertips, the smell of ink, and most importantly the strange comfort and familiarity that one develops with the book's physical presence. I thought back to my home library, bookshelves overflowing with literary relationships I've built over the years, and I caved: I found the nearest English-language book store in Tokyo to find my next read.

There in the stacks, I come upon Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form & Emptiness. The "form and emptiness" reference first piqued my curiousity, a reference to the Heart Sutra and perhaps the most revered line in the Zen lineage (of which Ozeki is a priest):

Some years ago, an experienced meditation teacher described his one-on-one interactions with students primarily consisting of listening to them, nodding sagely, and respond: yes, what you're experiencing is normal.

Most people[^linkedin] will go through some variation of the "quarter-life[^quarterlife] crisis." From the outside, these periods can seem chaotic and impulsive, from the inside confusing and frustrating. Having some idea of what to expect can be a helpful starting point -- things like major psychological studies or popular books are a good way to get a foothold -- but these are by nature written from a thousand-foot view.

To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

I recently spent a week on retreat up in the San Bernadino mountains. On the opening night, a teacher defined wisdom as "being grown-ups about our existential condition." At first that felt like an attack -- surely I'm not being childish -- but after sitting in silence for a week, letting those words run their course through me, I started to see some aspects of my own childishness.