Reviews

Nanase, who can read people’s minds, works as a maid while unraveling the dark, hidden psychological motives lurking within the household. Even setting aside the fact that it’s a comedy, I find the characters’ minds to be far too twisted. I was laughing as I read at first, but halfway through, I started to feel a bit sick of it…

A story depicting the harrowing life of Lu Yixin, one of the orphans left behind in China. Katsuo Matsumoto (age 7), the son of a family in a Manchurian settlement, was living in Manchuria when his family and fellow villagers were massacred during a Soviet military raid, and he was separated from his younger sister. Katsuo was fortunate enough to survive and was taken in by Lu Dezhi, a kind-hearted Chinese teacher. However, because he was Japanese, Katsuo faced severe discrimination and had t...

*Designing Machine Learning Systems* (by Chip Huyen, O’Reilly, 2022) is a book by Chip Huyen—a machine learning engineer well-known for his numerous blog posts on MLOps—that compiles the knowledge and mindset needed to design production-quality machine learning systems from the perspective of an experienced practitioner. I believe this is one of the most up-to-date books covering general topics for machine learning engineers. A Japanese translation was also published in 2023. To put it simply...

I read this around the time it was making headlines for winning the Akutagawa Prize. The story is set in Tokyo in 2030. LLMs have become completely mainstream, and everyone uses a chat AI called “AI-built” for writing and research. The protagonist is Sara Machina, a world-renowned architect who designed the recently constructed Tokyo Sympathy Tower (commonly known as the Tokyo Sympathy Tower) near Shinjuku Gyoen. Although the tower functions as a prison, its inner workings are entirely...

*Lord of the Flies* (by William Golding) serves as an antithesis to utopian castaway tales such as *The Swiss Family Robinson* and *The Coral Island*. It is a shocking allegory depicting a group of boys who crash-land on a deserted island in the South Pacific and, under extreme conditions, see the order of civilized society collapse, ultimately leading them to kill one another. It vividly illustrates the difficulty of maintaining common sense in a barbaric society. I couldn’t read the story...

There’s a line in the movie *A Love Like a Bouquet* that goes, “That person is the kind who wouldn’t feel a thing even if they read Natsuko Imamura’s *Picnic*.” Curious about what kind of book it was, I decided to read *Kochira Amiko*, the collection that includes this short story. As it turned out, I fell into the third category: “people who can’t understand the story.” I could tell something unsettling was happening, but I didn’t grasp its meaning until I read a spoiler. Like “Picnic,” many...

I read this book because it’s said to have served as the basis for *Crime and Punishment*, but I felt that, as a story, it lacked the same compelling power.

"Better to be one of a kind than number one"—a slogan we heard frequently during the Heisei era. In essence, this means we must find our own path to becoming number one, and that can sometimes be painful. Through its ensemble cast, this book highlights the difficulties of living. A sense of purpose—that is, the “realization that one is truly alive”—cannot be attained overnight. That is precisely why some people throw themselves into radical activities as a quick way to become someone special.

I’d been meaning to read this ever since I was a student, and now that I’ve finally gotten around to it, I can say it’s an unquestionable masterpiece. The themes explored in the novel are universal and still relevant today, and the realistic portrayal of the protagonist’s inner thoughts made for a thrilling read. I’ve summarized the details in “Crime and Punishment for Busy People,” so please check it out if you’re interested.

What prompted me to pick up this book was an article titled “Learning Methods from Motoori Norinaga’s *Uhiyama-bumi*” by Ryoma Sato, a scholar of whom I am a huge fan. Intrigued by the unexpected title, I gave it a read and was surprised to discover that a figure from the Edo period—someone I had never paid much attention to outside of Japanese history exams—had left behind universal teachings on learning methods. For example, there is the following passage: When reading a book casually, no...

*Speak Business English Like an American* (by Amy Gillett, Language Success Press, 2013) is a practical guidebook for learning idioms and expressions commonly used in the American business world. It covers a wide range of specific, useful phrases to help non-native English speakers speak English with confidence in the workplace. The book introduces frequently used business expressions in a conversational format, explaining the meaning and usage of each phrase. For example, you can learn in wh...

I’d been seeing it mentioned all over the place since it was first published, so I was curious about it, but I hesitated to read it after seeing the 2021 controversy over the reproducibility of behavioral economics. However, recently, with the emergence of OpenAI o1—said to employ System 2 thinking—Sam Altman’s endorsement, and the proposal of a preference optimization algorithm inspired by prospect theory, I’ve been seeing it mentioned more frequently again, so I finally decided to give it a...

*Antifragility: The Only Way to Survive in an Uncertain World* (by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, translated by Toshio Chiba, Diamond Inc., 2017) is a book that offers a new perspective called “antifragility”—a way of thinking that allows us not only to overcome uncertainty and unpredictable events but also to grow and benefit from them. The author, Taleb, is the researcher who introduced the concept of “unpredictable risks” in *The Black Swan*. In this book, he takes the discussion a step further an...

*Why Do Networks Connect? 2nd Edition* (by Tsutomu Tone, Nikkei BP, 2007) explains the entire process from entering a URL into a browser to the display of a web page, offering a systematic introduction to the network technologies that make it all work behind the scenes. The book’s greatest strength is its explanation of Internet communication based on “actual processes.” It systematically explains how data transforms as it travels through LAN cables, passes through the ISP, reaches the server...

I read it because it won the Akutagawa Award, I didn't understand it.

A collection of short stories. I felt that some of the themes in these stories led to later works such as "Shogeki" and "Megachurch". I liked "Nagareta" and "Such a thing must hurt".

I don't know. I just don't know.

Grrr

I want to be like that too

Read this on a day when you're feeling up to it—it might make you depressed

Clean hit

My favorite part of the book My favorite

The description of the rice looks delicious, I wonder if the English translation is as delicious as it looks.

I read it because it was popular, but I didn't get it!