Reviews

I totally have the potential to end up like this too, so I'll be careful.

This book reveals how the act of "writing a program" is transformed into action inside a computer. The flow of how source code is translated, loaded into memory, and executed by the CPU is explained with illustrations. Hardware and OS mechanisms are also covered, allowing the reader to learn the basics for a deeper understanding of the program. For example, the chapter on memory mechanisms answers questions such as why programs are deployed in memory and what the heap and stack do. When I was...

*Database Internals: A Deep Dive into How Distributed Data Systems Work* (by Alex Petrov, O’Reilly Media, 2019) is arguably the definitive textbook on databases. Although I have been writing SQL for analysis on a daily basis since I started working right out of college, my experience has been limited to read-only operations, and my understanding of concepts such as performance optimization and transactions was limited to pattern recognition. This made me feel a bit uneasy as a software...

As the title "Braids" suggests, the film depicts three women from different countries and backgrounds confronting their respective predicaments, and how their lives intersect at the end. Smita is a noncaste "untouchable" living in rural India, who has made her living by collecting excrement from the upper castes for generations. In this kind of life, it is her longing to get her daughter Lalita into school to learn to read and write, and to help her daughter escape from a situation like her o...

The overall structure of the story revolves around the narratives of 12 women (and others) who share three common elements: (1) they are of African descent, (2) they are biologically female (and, as indicated by the title’s mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive terms—"women," "girls," and "others"—this includes LGBT individuals), and (3) living in the UK—are told with care, each intertwining gradually with the others. This narrative style forms the core of the book’s appeal and...

Amiko lives in a world cut off from meaningful connections with others. She is surrounded by things that are “fun” and “cheerful,” and always seems very happy. The author’s writing style is deliberately simple and gentle, reminiscent of a children’s novel. The vocabulary used in the text is also exclusively cute and extremely simple. This is because the story is depicted from a perspective close to her own—she has a mild intellectual disability and is much like a kindergarten child. However,...

The story follows Lucius, a bath architect from the Roman Empire 130 years ago (during the reign of Emperor Hadrian), who is mysteriously transported to modern-day Japan. There, he learns about Japanese bathing culture and brings that knowledge back to ancient Rome to solve various problems facing the empire… The story features numerous archaeological sites familiar to those living in Rome—such as the Roman Forum, Tivoli, and Ostia Antica—and it’s fascinating to catch a glimpse of what life w...

*YABUNONAKA* (by Hitomi Kanahara, Bungeishunju, 2025) is an ensemble drama that tackles the equally contemporary theme of “accusation.” Triggered by a woman’s decision to come forward about past sexual exploitation a decade later, a series of incidents unfolds. The novel delves deeply into how the line between justice and perpetration becomes blurred—through retroactive condemnation and vigilante justice—as well as how each character constructs a version of the truth that suits their own...

BUTTER" (written by Asako Yuzuki, Shinchosha, 2020) is a suspense inspired by the serial murder case committed by defendant Kanae Kishima. The model woman, Manako Kajii, is arrested on suspicion of serial murder after bilking middle-aged men out of their money, but the work focuses less on the case itself and more on the emotional changes in Rika, a weekly magazine reporter who meets with her. As Rika actually cooks and reports on the food she was assigned as a condition for the interview, sh...

This is a new novel by the popular science fiction author known for *The Martian*, and, as usual, it features a plot where the protagonist must survive alone in space. Actually, this was the first full-length English novel I’ve ever finished reading, and since it’s written in simple English throughout and was easy to read, I’d recommend it to anyone looking to try reading English fiction. (Apparently, the Japanese translation is poor: https://note.com/hiroshima_pot/n/n31eb44bb2719)

As the wave of LLM and other foundational models is shifting from mere prototyping to the product development phase, this is a good book to learn how to leverage foundational models to build highly reliable applications. The book goes beyond mere technical explanations to explain the flow of incorporating infrastructure models into products from a practical perspective, from model selection, evaluation, prompt design, fine tuning, and scaling, keeping in mind the goal of creating a production...

I read some of it in classics class.