Moveable Feasts
A curated edit of interesting books, ideas, films, shows, culture and travel. With some wellness and balance thrown in.
I’m a debut author (July 2025, look out for my novel, My Other Heart), and a former Beauty Editor and Journalist.
I’m British Japanese and recently returned to London after living abroad for the last ten years: Melbourne, Saigon, Philadelphia, Singapore and before that Beijing, Tokyo and more. I’m now writing my second novel, promoting my first, slowly edging my way back to journalism and trying to raise my reassuringly headstrong daughter.
So what do I know?
I know books, not writing them per se (this is still very much a learning as I go process), but I know what I’ve loved, the books that have got me talking, thinking, books that have inspired me, characters who haven’t left me and places I long to revisit beyond my imagination. I love to read about dysfunctional families, underdogs, people doing terrible things, people doing wonderful things, heroism, cowardice, anti-heroes, heroes…the human experience. I know films and shows I’ve bonded with friends over, the knowing look you get between two new acquaintances as they quote the same Tony Soprano line or Larry David moment. It’s rare, but it’s as good as a meet-cute as far as I’m concerned, maybe better (oh yes, there are Rom-com’s aplenty).
I also know what it is to start again, to build relationships with strangers in the hope of finding new friends as you look for that thing that bonds you. How important it is to find community through common threads and how often that ends up being something to do with culture, interests and artforms, popular or otherwise. Whether it’s an affinity for a certain face cream or bumping into one another at a restaurant in search of the same famous bowl of noodles, it’s how I have always connected. The common threads of joy.
And place, has become so vital in everything I consume now, whether its the picture in my mind of a stilfling hot day in Manhattan as I read Taffy Brodesser Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble, or the multiple times I had to watch Eat Pray Love during the Pandemic so I could feel like I was transported to somewhere different. Every time I go to a place, I see it with different eyes, just like books and films, and even a song, they evolve at different points in life.
And if I may be a little earnest for a moment: when I was writing my forthcoming novel, it was the realisation of writing about what I knew, the experiences I knew and had been through first-hand that gave me the starting point. The ideas came and some were fantastical and beyond my world, but others started right there in the most modest and accessible of places: from within.
And when I’ve felt at my loneliest, in a brand new place knowing nobody, not speaking the language, it has been the books, the films, the shows, the exercise, the music that has kept me company, kept me strong. It’s also the podcasts I listened to, from the gentle story-telling from Ira Glass in This American Life to guffawing along with Carloline O’Donoghue in Sentimental Garbage.
So here is what you’ll find:
New books, old books, favourite books, difficult books, palate-cleansing books
Writing conundrums
Films and plot-lines, Shows and characters
Wellness, or is it Balance?
All of this is wrapped up in travel, learning to shift cultures and growing…the things I’ve learned.
I’ll post every week on Tuesday mornings.
Join me, we might just hit it off.