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Personal announcement about the direction I'm taking this account:
I've been writing regularly here for something like eight years now.
It started one morning when I woke up and told myself: what if I started to journal online and wrote a few posts in English every day? This shouldn't be difficult as long as I'm living a life worth writing about. I'll probably get more eloquent in the process, improve my English, and potentially make some friends.
On the small desk of my old share-house room in Tokyo, there was a computer, an orange, and a few books.
That’s how “Orange Book” was born.
My writing probably evolved quite a lot throughout the years, but the core idea has always been “write what you want/need to read” and “self-reflect on your own unique experiences, find your own words, write them down, and maybe they will resonate with a few other people out there as well.”
I value my own privacy, so I naturally decided to create a faceless account, write in an impersonal voice, and leave aside most of the details of my personal life. I also didn’t want to spoil my own intergenerational novel that I'd been working on for many years now that is based on the stories of my family.
Unfortunately, it also increasingly felt like I was writing in a voice that AI could replicate anytime; but also, after iterating on so many different drafts of my book, I slowly understood that the “final version” was going to take a very different shape.
It has many characters, many locations, many perspectives, many voices that aren’t mine, and it was getting obvious that a lot of the details of my personal journey that I had kept “secret” were never going to make it to the book anyway, so I thought I might as well share them with the people who wanted to know.
Going forward, I am shifting most of my writing to the subscription space, and although the topics will remain similar - health, wealth, education, relationships, talent, purpose, and more recently, parenting - I will adopt a much more personal voice, far closer to who I am in real life, and hope to attract readers who care more about the real-life stories than the lessons I once extracted from them.
Recently, it sometimes felt like I was becoming a caricature of myself anyway, and people who have been following me for many years probably noticed how my output had been decreasing. I tried to renew myself as a writer last year by interviewing other people, but it turns out that I am more of an essayist than a journalist; and hopefully, I’ll be able to call myself a novelist soon.
After nearly 15,000 public tweets, I’m making a shift towards pursuing a much more personal and authentic voice on this platform.
Big thanks to all the people who have been reading me throughout the years, I’m very grateful for the connections I’ve made here, and I hope to see some of you on the other side.
Orange Book
English