The past month has been a month of literary indulgence. I devoured eleven books, but there is one that’s stuck with me in a way I didn’t expect. ‘Tales from the Café’ by Toshikazu Kawaguchi.
There’s something quietly seismic about Kawaguchi’s writing. His prose doesn’t shout, it listens. It asks questions with the gentleness of steam rising from a cup and yet the answers land with the weight of lives half-lived, regrets unspoken, love left lingering in doorways we didn’t return to.
There are books we outgrow. And then there are books that grow with us. The Little Prince has always been, for me, a kind of compass – one that pointed inward, rather than north. It was one of my favorite books as a child, the one I returned to obsessively, first in French, then in English, later in other languages I was learning, as if by changing the language I could uncover some deeper, truer layer of meaning. This weekend, I read it again, this time in Italian, and something shifted.