A record of contact—thinkers, writers, and artists whose work has shaped how I see and write. Not a canon, not a reading list. Just the residue of encounters that stuck.
Philosophy & Theory
Thinkers in critical theory, continental philosophy, and political thought whose frameworks I return to constantly—Baudrillard and Debord on the image and spectacle; Deleuze and Guattari on desire, affect, and assemblage; Agamben on bare life and the state of exception; Benjamin on ruins, allegory, and historical time; Rancière on the distribution of the sensible; Blanchot on writing and disaster; Foucault on power and the body; Lacan and Derrida on the limits of language; Badiou on truth and the event; Han on burnout and transparency; Cioran on negation and sleeplessness; Žižek on ideology; Azuma and Karatani on postmodernity in East Asia; Yuk Hui on cosmotechnics.
- Gilles Deleuze
- Jean Baudrillard
- Giorgio Agamben
- Roland Barthes
- Michel Foucault
- Maurice Blanchot
- Walter Benjamin
- Jacques Rancière
- Byung-Chul Han (한병철)
- Emil Cioran
- Slavoj Žižek
- Hiroki Azuma (東浩紀)
- Kojin Karatani (柄谷行人)
- Jacques Lacan
- Jacques Derrida
- Alain Badiou
- Yuk Hui (許煜)
Fiction
A range held together by formal intensity rather than style: the violent interiority of Mishima, the spectral tenderness of Miyazawa, Pessoa’s heteronyms, Kafka’s procedural dread, Borges’s geometric infinities, Carver’s silences, Houellebecq’s cold sociology, Tokarczuk’s mythic mobility, Aira’s improvised delirium, DFW’s maximalist grief, Shibusawa’s decadent arcana—and the precise, low-register melancholy of contemporary Japanese and Korean women’s fiction.
- Yukio Mishima (三島由紀夫)
- Kenji Miyazawa (宮沢賢治)
- Gabriel García Márquez
- Mo Yan (莫言)
- Olga Tokarczuk
- César Aira
- Ryū Murakami (村上龍)
- Raymond Carver
- Kazuki Sakuraba (桜庭一樹)
- Nishio Ishin (西尾維新)
- Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (澁澤龍彦)
- Hermann Hesse
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Franz Kafka
- Kim Ae-ran (김애란)
- David Foster Wallace
- Michel Houellebecq
- Banana Yoshimoto (吉本ばなな)
- Yasunari Kawabata (川端康成)
- Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (芥川龍之介)
- Fernando Pessoa
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Jorge Luis Borges
- J.D. Salinger
- Haruki Murakami (村上春樹)
Poetry
Poets of rupture, grief, and precision. Celan’s language pushed to and past its breaking point; Vallejo’s viscera on the page; Tranströmer’s quiet catastrophes; Baudelaire’s fleurs; Plath’s controlled combustion; Eliot’s montage of ruins; Ungaretti’s stripped syllables; René Char’s aphoristic resistance; Luo Fu’s sinographic density; Yosano Akiko’s erotic sovereignty; Le Corbusier’s manifestos as prose-poetry; Saigo Tahi’s luminous, net-native fragmentation.
- Yosano Akiko (与謝野晶子)
- Tomas Tranströmer
- Giuseppe Ungaretti
- César Vallejo
- Luo Fu (洛夫)
- T.S. Eliot
- Sylvia Plath
- Le Corbusier
- René Char
- Charles Baudelaire
- Paul Celan
- Saigo Tahi (最果タヒ)
Music
My listening is wide and doesn’t settle. Most of it orbits Japan—underground and mainstream pop, jazz, city pop, post-punk, noise rock, and the stranger edges of J-rock. Beyond that: jazz house and hip-hop, instrumental jazz and blues across eras, independent and alternative music from various scenes, and extreme metal and hardcore in most of its subgenres.
A few fixed coordinates—artists whose work recurs regardless of mood or context:
- Sheena Ringo (椎名林檎) / Tokyo Jihen (東京事変)
- tsumiki (ツミキ) / NOMELON NOLEMON
- Betcover!!