Book Review: ‘How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart’ by Florentyna Leow (friendship, heartbreak and finding home)
I’d not heard of ‘How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart’ when it was offered to us for review by The Emma Press, but with a comparison to Nina Mingya Powles’ stunning ‘Tiny Moons’ and sold as a debut essay collection talking about friendship and heartbreak set in Japan, it was an instant yes from us.
We both fell in love with Japan when we visited in 2018 and actually had a return trip planned for 2021 that included a few days in Kyoto which (of course) got cancelled, so this was a lovely way to visit the city while we re-group and re-plan for when we’re able to make our way there ourselves once again. I fell in love with Kyoto through Leow’s writing, though for the quiet places, the small moments and the hidden corners rather than the big tourist spots that you travel to Kyoto to see.
This is what the collection is all about:
20-something and uncertain about her future, Florentyna Leow is exhilarated when an old acquaintance offers her an opportunity for work and cohabitation in a little house in the hills of Kyoto.
Florentyna begins a new job as a tour guide, taking tourists on elaborate and expensive trips around Kyoto’s cultural hotspots. Amidst the busy tourist traps and overrun temples, Florentyna develops her own personal map of the city: a favourite smoky jazz kissa; a top-shelf katsuobushi loving cat; an elderly lady named Yamaguchi-san, who shares her sweets and gives Florentyna a Japanese name.
Meanwhile, her relationship with her new companion develops an intensity as they live and work together. Their little kitchen, the epicenter of their shared life, overlooks a community garden dominated by a fruitful persimmon tree. Their relationship burns bright, but seasons change, the persimmon tree out back loses its fruit, and things grow strange between the two women.
Leow’s collection is a beautifully written exploration of friendship, making a city your home and heartbreak through food writing, travel, cultural and social explorations and elements of memoir. It should be too much for such a slim volume, but it works perfectly.
The first essay focuses on food and the exploration of the ways that you experience food and cooking with other people really sets the tone for the collection, and I love the way it that circles back to food with the final essay, ‘Egg Love’. The idea of intimacy as knowing how someone likes their eggs really clicked with me and I immediately had to run through my favourite people, checking whether I knew how they like their eggs.
Having visited Japan, I was really interested in the way that Leow explores the ways that the country treats foreigners and the issue of over-tourism in cities like Kyoto. The conflict of the old and the new; the modern and the traditional; the push for progress battling against holding on to outdated ideas and values - it’s all there, if briefly, and how all of these conflicts and problems with Japan as a culture and society in comparison to the perfect ideal of visiting Japan.
This is a beguiling and introspective collection that explores what happens when the people and places that you have made your home, have to be left, or leave you behind.
‘How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart’ will be published by The Emma Press on 23 February 2023.
Thank you to The Emma Press for providing a proof copy for review.
Written by Sophie
