Over four months ago, in the darkness of a late-night flight, we arrived in Seoul for the first time. I remember the rain. It was pouring when we landed and it kept pouring the next day, as if the city wanted to introduce itself through its weather first — insistent, dramatic, entirely unbothered by what anyone else thought of it. We came in late, exhausted, dragging our mountain of luggage through streets that were unfamiliar in the particular way that only night-time street

It has been four hours since my husband walked out the door with our three children, called a cab, and sent them off to a shopping centre in Sapporo. Alone. Just the three of them. I am sitting in the quiet apartment they left behind, and I am thinking about freedom — what it actually looks like, how it is built, how long it takes, and how quietly astonishing it is when you finally see it walking out the door in the bodies of your own children. When we decided to homeschool —

It is a lazy Saturday in Sapporo. Dusty rain simmering outside the window. One of those days where boredom and restlessness arrive together and there is nothing useful to do with either of them except sit with it and see what surfaces. I will be honest: I don’t like Sapporo. It was probably the one significant planning mistake we made this year — a city that sounded appealing in the abstract, recommended by enough people over enough years that it accumulated a kind of borrowe

At 7:45 every morning, the crickets begin. I know this now the way you come to know the rhythms of a place you have lived inside long enough — not because you checked the time but because your body learned it, the way bodies learn things that happen consistently and with conviction. They start softly and build quickly, layering sound upon sound until the air outside is thick with it — a living, pulsing wall of noise that my children have begun to complain about with increasin

A few days ago I lay on the turquoise blue bed of my acupuncturist Masashi-san at Dome Therapy Niseko, long needles placed with quiet precision in various parts of my body, listening to the rain insisting against the windows and the gentle melody of the Totoro theme drifting through the room. I thought about writing. I thought about the future just ahead of us, still unformed, still full of the particular combination of possibility and anxiety that the future always carries w

Green How I Love Green “Green how I love you green. Green wind. Green boughs. The ship on the sea and the horse on the mountain”. — Federico García Lorca, Romance Sonámbulo Lorca wrote those lines about passion and death and the strange green light that exists at the threshold between one world and the next. I thought of them the moment we arrived in Niseko. Because the green here is not gentle. It is not the polite, decorative green of a park or a garden. It is insistent and

She has been counting down to today for weeks. I find that both funny and quietly touching — this particular eagerness of an eleven-year-old for time to move faster, when I spend so much of my own life wishing it would slow down. She has been watching the days reduce with impatience and delight, and I have been watching her watch them, thinking: this is one of the many ways we are different from each other, and one of the many ways I love her. Today is Silja’s birthday. She i

Last night I danced Bachata in Kyoto. I want to let that sentence sit for a moment, because it is the kind of sentence that should not exist and yet does — the kind that could only belong to this life, this year, this particular constellation of decisions that led me, somehow, to a small café called Rumbita in one of Japan’s most ancient cities, moving to Latin music with a Frenchman who did speak English but the facts is that he actually didn’t need to. Moving in the rhythm

I have been listening to A Snicker of Magic with my daughter — the audiobook version, our current ritual for quiet moments and long journeys — a children’s story with a slightly crooked title, about a town that may or may not still hold its magic, and a girl named Felicity who collects words the way other children collect shells or stones. We were near the end, one of the last chapters, when a sentence arrived that made me reach for the pause button. I played it again. Then o

There is a particular kind of joy that only return makes possible. Not the joy of arriving somewhere new — that particular aliveness of the unknown, which I love and which this life gives me in abundance. But the other kind. The quieter, warmer, more surprising kind: the joy of arriving somewhere you already love and discovering that it loves you back. That it has been here, unchanged in the ways that matter, waiting. Kyoto does this to me every time. I keep saying it out lou

There are days that arrive quietly and become, without announcing themselves, something you will carry for a long time. Today was one of those. Ginkakuji area on a tender early afternoon. My dear friend Irene and I found ourselves at a small restaurant in this neighbourhood of Kyoto that holds its beauty without advertising it — old wooden facades, narrow streets that feel like they belong to a different century, the particular hush of a place that has not tried very hard to

I am writing this while a typhoon passes over Kyoto. The rain is not falling so much as being thrown — sideways, in sheets, with an insistence that makes the ordinary sounds of the city entirely disappear. Everything outside the window is moving: the trees, the puddles, the air itself. Kyoto, which is usually so composed, so deliberate, has been temporarily returned to something wilder and older than its careful streets suggest. I find it, unexpectedly, beautiful. I have been

Transitioning to Japan was easy. Like returning to something you already knew would be good. We were ready to leave Haeundae Beach — and I want to come back to that, because by the end we had made something real out of those last weeks in Busan, found our corners and our people and our rhythms, the way we always eventually do. But the leaving itself, when it finally came, felt right. The timing was right. We were ready. The journey was unremarkable in the best possible way. H

I am sitting in my favourite café in Busan — the one I finally found after weeks of searching, the one that fits — and I have exactly one week left before we leave for Japan. I just had to open my calendar to check when we arrived in South Korea. April 9th. Late, cold, dragging our luggage through unfamiliar streets into a Seoul apartment while everyone else was already asleep. That was seven weeks ago. Seven weeks that feel, in the particular way this nomadic life has of com

There is a particular kind of gift you can only give yourself. Not bought in a shop or wrapped in anything. Not organised by someone who loves you, however thoughtfully. It is the gift of choosing, entirely on your own authority, to do something that feels extravagant and slightly terrifying and completely worth it — and then walking through the door anyway. On May 5th, I walked through the door of Mori. I only found out after the evening what the name means. Mori — 森 — is th

Yesterday was heavy. After writing club and a beach meetup, I accepted what my knee had been quietly telling me for days — that it was not ready, that pushing it would cost more than the workout was worth — and chose a walk instead. My husband met me and we went to Tide, the coffee shop that had been sitting on my radar since we arrived in Busan, slightly too far, slightly too late-opening, never quite fitting the architecture of my mornings. I want to tell you about Tide, be

Time flies. Sometimes it moves fast, almost insultingly so — whole days gone before you had a chance to inhabit them. And sometimes it becomes a slow drip from somewhere above, the kind you watch with fading patience, knowing the bucket will never fill at this rate, knowing your endurance will give out long before it does. I have written about time before. I think about it often, feel it in my body, try to make peace with it. I never arrive at anything particularly clever or

There are places you fall into like a warm bath. And there are places that hold you at arm’s length — politely, without malice, but firmly — as if to say: this is not yours, not quite, not yet. Haeundae Beach is the second kind, for me. I have been sitting with this for a few days now, turning it over, trying to understand where resistance comes from — because I think that question matters. It is not simply about whether a place is objectively beautiful or interesting or wort

We left for Busan on a Sunday. From Seoul — the city that had taken my whole soul in a single moment, that had filled my cup with noise and jazz and cherry blossoms and a crab seller clapping her hands at us in a night market — we packed our bags, called an Uber, and moved on. The way we always do. The way we have learned to do. The trunk was a puzzle of luggage. The train station felt vast and slightly hostile, the way unfamiliar train stations always do — too many signs in

-April 16th, 2026 — Day 6 in Seoul I am sitting in a local coffee shop somewhere in Seoul, and the world outside is doing what Seoul does best: buzzing, moving, existing at full volume and full speed. Cars stream past the window. People weave through each other with the practiced fluency of a city that has long since stopped apologising for its own intensity. From somewhere in the back room, a coffee roaster growls. And over all of it, from an old-fashioned gramophone in the