Tettyo Saito: a conversation with the first Japanese writer who writes in Romanian

English edition: Kathelijne Bonne
Today I bring a special entry. I spoke to Tettyo Saito, the first Japanese writer to write and publish in Romanian. What was going to be a short article about this writer’s life, turned into a long reflection
between two people communicating virtually. We talked about literature, technology, post-work, literary circles and the mechanisms of new authors to disseminate their work. Along the way, he sold 10,000 copies of his book in Japan, but that is the least of it. Here we won’t talk about money, but about
art, literature, Japan and the place Romania has in Tettyo’s life. Enjoy.

Why the interview

I often go to the Tokyo Metropolitan Library in Arisugawa Park, while my son plays soccer. I go there to study Japanese or wander through all those books in silence. I am moved to see people silently studying, working. They don’t gesticulate, they don’t flatter, they don’t wave their hands. They don’t seek status. They just study.

That day I stopped at the section of Romanian authors who have been translated into Japanese. I was curious to see the Japanese covers of books I’ve read. Of course, there were Cărtărescu, Mircea Eliade and other popes of the Romanian scene.

But there was something else: a small book with an endless title. How beautiful. And what a pity I couldn’t read it. But there was something else.

In Japan, it is normal for foreign titles translated into Japanese to keep the original title on the cover. In this case it read in Romanian: Eu nu prea ies din casă, abia de părăsesc Chiba, nu am fost niciodată în străinătate, dar am devenit scriitor român[1]. What a strange, explanatory and appealing title. However, the author was Japanese. How confusing.

Who is Tettyo Saito?

Of course, I did my research and found out things. He is the first Japanese author to publish in Romanian (to such a degree he is listed as a Romanian author in the library). I did my research using a lot of material in Japanese and Romanian (two languages I cannot read without a translator) and some in English. Tettyo Saito was born in 1992, and has been a hikikomori ひきこもり for a few years now. He started out doing film reviews on the Internet and somewhere along the way, he fell in love with the Romanian language.

I don’t want to give away much of his life story here because he tells it below, but I want to say that I picked up his story because, beyond the topics he writes about, the way he approaches literature is peculiar and I find that it can be a new way to understand the cultural scene. Or maybe it is not so new after all? There has always been creation from the margins. Far away from literary circuits. Or removed from artists who are not looking for art to be able to “talk” about it.

I’m also interested in understanding the generation after mine, the one born in the nineties, that looks at the world with inquisitive and often somewhat wounded eyes. They no longer pursue stable jobs, Christmas bonuses, vacations. I have had the opportunity to talk to Japanese born in the nineties, they are open-minded people, they speak more than one language (not necessarily English) and some of them are trying to escape from what Japanese society expects of them.

Tettyo talked to me about many things, but without erudition. Like two people who simply want to get to know more about each other. About foreign languages. The foreignness to create. The publishing world, creation, capitalism, literary circuits, technology, identity. The new exponents of Japanese and Romanian literature.

And there’s a subject that sometimes obsesses me. The search for one’s own language when one lives and writes far from one’s country of origin. I lived it in Spain and that experience is now relived in Japan. It’s the search for a foreign language as an escape route.

Perhaps translating is also that. Some time ago I brought you an interview in Spanish with Andrei, founder of The Untranslated, a website dedicated to untranslated literature, a guy determined to read monumental works in their original language.

Seen in this way, the untranslated language is a kind of tragedy. A prison perhaps, that of one’s own culture. To escape through translation is to escape to the homes of others. The life of Arthur Waley, translator of Genji from Chinese who never set foot in China, also comes to mind. This idea of traveling with literature to other places.Cioran said that French was a “Cartesian language” to him, so he admired languages like Hungarian. Savater recalled that one day in a bar Cioran told him: “I would like to agonize in Hungarian” (p.43)[2].

To write far from one’s own land. Rebuilding something that broke along the way. Stirring in the rubble. Damage control.

Maybe that’s just what literature is about.

Translation and technology

Before moving on to the interview I need to share some reflections on the translation of this text itself, something that permeates the whole article, and I want to comment on the very fact of the translation of this text, something that haunts the whole article, but which I want to dwell on.

None of this would have been possible without the possibilities of communication that technology has given us. Increasingly, human translators are relying on artificial intelligence. It is still a no man’s land, like the Internet in the 90s where the lack of regulation and the initial chaos gave rise to abuses and wonderful things in equal parts. In this case, we turned to the available machine translations (using Google and Deepl, which are not AI in the strict sense), posing  complex questions that require even more complex answers that need reflection of the written language.  A lot of post-editing work is needed [to get rid of machine translation mistakes, put the subtleties unseen by AI back in], and to make the result reader-friendly.

The subtleties of language are not only prediction and past, they are also creativity and future. There the machine cannot do anything.

Obviously, in any translation, things get lost along the way, but it seems to me a miracle that I, from my Argentinean Spanish, am tracing invisible bridges to reach the brain of someone in Chiba who thinks and writes in Japanese and Romanian.

Just look at the route: my mind thinks in Spanish, asks questions, writes them in Spanish, translates them into English and they travel to Chiba. In Chiba a brain receives my questions, grabs them and makes them travel to Japanese, once there the text rests, perhaps in the head, and then, technology permitting, it is being put on paper or on the screen, answers being thought and written in Japanese.

Then, perhaps some more rest. The mind also burns calories. And after a while, the reverse process happens. A language that travels from Japanese to English, through automatic translators and editing, a journey that lands on my screen and that I, piano piano, take back to Spanish. On the way, I take a breath, I examine the state of the art.

I have to reconstitute the text, put it back together, like a exhausted jetlagged body. Like a scarecrow already subjected to the elements. Immersed in the hustle and bustle, but eager to reach their destination. It is a miracle. We have been able to communicate. ありがとうございます Tettyo.

The prison of the mother tongue

Let’s start with the beginnings. Were you always interested in foreign languages? Or was it a late interest?

I started being interested in foreign languages when I was in high school. “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure,” was one of my all-time favorite manga’s. It features Italy and its culture, inciting me to get to know more about this interesting country and buy a textbook of Italian language with my pocket money. And I chose Spanish language as a second language in college because Italian and Spanish belong to same group of Roman languages. So I wondered: “could it be easier to study Spanish with knowledge of Italian?”

And later on, when I was already a hikikomori , I finally got in touch with Romanian. At first it helped me to forget the harsh reality around me, built by Japanese language, but then I gradually fell in love with this beautiful language although it is hard to explain the details of the how or why. But it gave me a deep relief, and later a so-called sense of wonder. That is how studying Romanian or other foreign languages became a hobby in itself, and worth dedicating my life to.

I would like to know more about your learning process and what the Romanian language gave you that Japanese couldn’t.

At first, I studied Romanian using Japanese textbooks, they were so few, that only three books were useful for the study, one of which was written 40 years ago in the Communist era. After that, in order to integrate Romanian in my daily life, I sent a friend request to 3000-4000 Romanian people on Facebook, which completely inundated my timeline by Romanian. At the same time, I used the online magazine Vice to compare original English articles with their Romanian translations, and that way I learned a massive amount of vulgar words in Romanian! It was unbelievable that later I was invited to write an essay in Romanian for Vice Romania.

Pola Oloixarac says that she wrote Mona first in English and then translated it into Spanish. Murakami used a similar process to write his first novel. Can the foreign language be a kind of creative outlet or a way to escape into other worlds?  Is one’s own language sometimes an obstacle to creation?

Absolutely yes. I can run away from my miserable reality and miserable self by studying foreign languages. I think that learning a new language is becoming a new self. Actually, I feel that diverse elements of who I am, like my personality or mindset, have drastically changed after discovering Romanian. For example, I don’t hold back to communicate with people both online or in the real world..

Is language itself sometimes an obstacle to creation?

At first, I believed so. But in the process of studying Romanian, I learned to communicate in Japanese. And by seeing Japan from the right distance, I also learned to evaluate its advantages and disadvantages more calmly.

When you get immersed in a foreign language, the actually important thing might be the ability to use your own mother tongue. I’m writing these answers in English, but they’re based on the words I wrote in Japanese first, in order to express my thoughts in more exact, meticulous and sincere way. Now I think that the mother tongue is like a jumping board for achieving at a higher level, rather than an obstacle. Thanks to Romanian language, this is the way I now think.

Literary circles and creation in the Japanese and Romanian scene

How was the process of starting to publish in Romania? You mention in your book that a Romanian literary magazine suddenly decided not publish you, being a bit suspicious of your level of Romanian. Have you encountered much resistance in the Romanian literary scene?

In a first instance, I wrote a short story as one of the ways to study Romanian. I started with one sentence, a diary entry, leading to a short introduction of Japanese contemporary literature, and finally a short story! And after I finished writing, I posted something like this on Facebook with the idea to show it to people: “I wrote a short story about the dark side of Japan in Romanian language. Are you interested?”. And among people who got interested in my short story there was a person named Mihail Victus, who ran an online literary magazine LiterNautica, which I debuted in, suddenly and unexpectedly, as a Japanese writer of Romanian language.

LiterNautica is thus my “base camp” for my Romanian writings, and some other magazines also publish me. I feel that the Romanian literary scene is relatively open and free, but as a rare exception the magazine you mentioned irritated me a lot. Still, this experience gave me one revelation: my words are “limba japonezo-română / Japanese-Romanian language,” rather than Romanian, which has been an utter breakthrough to me. Now, I am grateful for that magazine. In these ways the Romanian literary scene has interesting, diverse possibilities into which I want to dig more deeply.

Cioran hated literary and intellectual circles. He didn’t spend his life in seclusion, but he saw few people, he only moved around by bicycle and got about in his neighborhood on foot. He went out little. He often said that his philosophical reference was the homeless guy on the street corner. To what extent is a new generation of writers emerging outside of the literary circuits? Is this something you are seeing?

On one hand there are people who write travelling all over the world, and on the other, people who write without leaving their own city or place. I think that these tendencies get more polarized for the new generation. It implies that writers become polarized into people emerging in either the center, or at the outer margins of the literary circuits. In my perspective my book tries to show a new way to create for the latter, showing a new kind of ambition of creating something great in the place where you happen to live, in case you can’t get out because of economic or physical troubles.

I don’t think that those solitary writers will be able to make a big wave to change the scene, or I doubt that this wave can be palpable or prominent in the literary circles in the future, because those writers always create from their own aspiration as lone wolves, beyond solidarity. But it also means that there may already be several writers that have a reputation in certain areas, like me, having had some recognition for Romania and Japan. We live in the age of “World Literature” but, if the prominence of writers like me increases, the age of “Local Literature” may return in a new way: Literature written in a certain language and in a certain area, worthy of being read in that language and area. Literature against “universal” and “international”. «Local” might get new meanings beyond our expectations and its definition in the dictionary, thanks to Internet and social media. I’m looking forward to such an age.

The experience of publishing in Japan

How did you happen to publish your memoirs in Japanese?  Had you already tried to publish in your own language? What were the outcomes? Did it meet your expectations?

It was completely out of blue. When I tried to improve my hikikomori condition, I went to the shopping mall close to my home and read books borrowed from the library. Then I checked my gmail account through free WiFi in the mall and I found a message with a proposal. Truly suddenly. Actually, I didn’t even try, I didn’t expect it to happen and I didn’t have a wish to publish a book written in Japanese, published in Japan. Because I wanted to publish a book in Romania, written in Romanian. But when I got the message, I thought “Gee, finally writing becomes my profession.” And then I started to write a book at a furious speed and finished the first manuscript just after 3 weeks.

How was your relationship with your Japanese publisher and with the Japanese writers’ community in general? Do you think there is a ghetto that is difficult to enter, or do different universes coexist without much dialogue between each other?

The relationship with them is good. Until recently writing was a hobby but now it is a job. I noticed that it’s unexpectedly exciting to collaborate with editors or publishers. I feel that I enjoy the bright side of working, in other words, the pleasure to create something together. I write mainly essays, and editors specializing in it are serious in discovering new unknown yet talented writers in the infinite sea of the internet. I’ve been found  in that sea too, so I feel that this area is relatively energetic and open, unlike a ghetto. Still, every genre does have its own world and editors may not actively communicate with each other. That is why I at least try to communicate with people in those other worlds. For example, I participated as a guest in a podcast hosted by a bookstore clerk and a biologist who is writing a book. It was a really great experience talking about my book, science and foreign language.

Are there any plans for the book “The story of how I, a ‘hikikomori’ who rarely leaves Chiba, became a novelist in Romanian without going aboard even once” to be translated into other languages?

Actually it is confirmed to be translated into Korean[3] to be published at October. Unbelievable but wonderful! Yesterday I talked with the editor and translator about changing the title in the Korean edition and how to write my name in Korean characters. It’s 사이토뎃초! Maybe you can have a look at the Korean edition of my book by googling these words. It’s a gigantic first step for my dream of having my book read all over Asia. And it would be great if a Spanish version can be published as a happy outcome of this interview! But firstly, I hope that it gets published in Romanian.

New and classic exponents of Japanese and Romanian literature

Which Japanese contemporary authors can you recommend to someone who wants to start reading Japanese literature?

I recommend Aoko Matsuda and her short collection “Where the Wild Ladies Are”. It is an interesting fusion of traditional Japanese horror stories and cutting-edge feminism, through which you get a feel of the current Japanese society and the tendencies in Japanese contemporary literature. And there is an important person named Polly Barton, one of the most influential and prolific Japanese-English literary translators. Her translation “So We Look to the Sky” by Misumi Kubo, is a must-read, as well as “Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder” by Asako Yuzuki, and “There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job” by Kikuko Tsumura etc. Her presence influences how contemporary Japanese literature and its image are perceived internationally. Several Spanish editions must be around too. And I highly recommend “Hunchback” by Saou Ichikawa, which will probably also be translated into Spanish anytime soon. This is a powerful, belligerent novella about disability, ableism and female desire. Reading this book is like being punched in your brain.

Romania is more and more present in the global literary scene, and especially in Spanish, and especially in Spanish. The success of writers like Cărtărescu or Tatiana Țîbuleac in Spanish has helped to maintain interest in that culture. Is something similar happening in Japan?

Not at all! I envy Spanish language because Spanish and Romanian belong to the same Romance language group , so translation between them is less difficult and smoother than between Romanian and Japanese. Look at those translations: literatura, literatură, bungaku / 文学. Or, buenos días, bună ziua, konnichiwa / こんにちは. Because of this difference it’s very hard for the Japanese to study Romance languages, especially Romanian with the lack of tools, so the number of translators is very limited. Still, it’s great that the readers of my book also read some Romanian literature like Mircea Eliade’s “Miss Cristina” or Gheorghe Săsărman’s “Squaring the Circle”, which pleased me a lot.

Could you recommend some Romanian authors that you particularly like?

I like Mircea Eliade a lot, whose profound novels immerse me in the beauty and ominousness of Romanian culture in the most prominent, attractively labyrinthine way. But I want to talk about a newcomer in Romanian literature with whom I’m impressed. It’s “Scurt tratat despre animalele care lucrează de acasă”[4]) by Alex Olteanu. This novel is about a lonely man who teleworks from home and seeks for true connection with other people. The author Olteanu describes his attempts with dry-wit humor which feels slightly cold and bitter. He and I belong to same generation (he was born in 1993 and I in 1992) and I feel I share with him a sense of pessimistic humor and incompetence, even though we’re far from each other geographically. I hope that this book will receive international recognition.

I know you are interested in minority languages. Could you tell us what language you are currently studying and if you have a method?

Actually the language which I’m studying now is Galician, which is like a beautiful hybrid of Spanish and Portuguese, and maybe some readers of the Spanish version of this publication can understand it to some extent (and maybe some English can too!): Chámome Tettyo Saito. Son xapónes, vivo en Tokyo, e gústame cultura galega, especialmente a música e as películas. Un pracer coñecerte! Or look at these Galician sentences which I found on the online dictionary; “Dende aquel día non o volvín ver.” “Só un milagre pode volver a auga en viño.” and so on. You can understand them, right? (Maybe more than me!)

I’m learning Galician because I love the Galician contemporary music so much. Éric Dopazo, Nadie Gonzalez, Grampoder, Mocho Gris and my absolute favorite Ataque Escampe. I study Galician through listening to their songs and reading their lyrics, like someone who studies Spanish by reading the poetry of Sor Juana, Octavio Paz or Cesar Vallejo. And one day I wrote a fan letter on Facebook to Ataque Escampe in Galician which I learned through their lyrics, and they got back to me, in Galician! This is one of the highlights in 2024. Overall, my method is to enjoy studying foreign language and help you as well finding ways to enjoy it.

What would you recommend to someone who is studying Japanese? Any reading to start with?

The important thing if you want to study a foreign language is to embed it into your daily life. The easiest way is to live in the country where that language is spoken, but many people can’t do that, including me. I recommend people to follow many, many Japanese people on Twitter who tweet in Japanese. Then Japanese words, Japanese sentences, Japanese expressions and Japanese memes pour into your timeline, so you can read Japanese every time you check Twitter, by which your eyes and brain get used to Japanese (or any other foreign language). That way, you can overcome the psychological barrier to experience something new to you. Fortunately, no one uses Twitter more obsessively than Japanese, so there must be people who tweet about topics you’re interested in like literature, cinema, food or travel. And what you learn this way is modern Japanese used by Japanese people today, unlike in some books. I’m on Twitter, tweeting in Japanese mainly about cinema and literature, so feel free to follow me. I’ll help you to study Japanese and to learn more about Japanese culture!

In some interview I’ve heard you say that you find similarities between Cărtărescu and Murakami. We know that both are eternal candidates for the Nobel Prize, but… can cities and their hidden places be just another character in their stories?

They’re both candidates for the Nobel Prize, are deeply influenced by American culture, and both are obsessed with women’s nipples… In other words, misogyny abounds which refrains me from reading their works. For a long time, I’ve wondered why Murakami is read widely all over the world, including by feminists and queer people, while there is irritating sexism and misogyny. Therefore, most of their work fails to appeal to me. Well, I may exaggerate about Cărtărescu though, as I have actually just read some parts of his oeuvre.

Continuing on Japanese literature and going beyond the internalized misogyny, the works of new generation female writers are receiving international recognition.  Amongst them are Mieko Kawakami, Hiroko Oayamada, Natsuko Imamura or Aoko Matsuda mentioned earlier (With the help of great translators like, for example in English, the aforementioned Polly Barton, David Boid, Morgan Giles etc). Maybe this trend will continue by introducing new queer writers like Akira Outani, Jose Ando, etc. So I hope that similar ones in Romanian contemporary literature get recognized as well, like Raluca Nagy, Maria Orbán, Diana Bădica, Cristina Chira etc. And there are more talents I could name. In the end, I want you to know that Japanese literature is much more than Murakami, and Romanian literature is much more than Cărtărescu.

Technology, the body, and creation

There is an idea that underlies your life-journey that can be inspiring and disturbing at the same time. It seems that your story has to do with creating a community and a mission in life that transcends the material, the body and space. You talk in an interview about a ‘meta- reality’ in which we communicate and create a community. This is also what Eric Sadin says in La vie spectrale[5] when he talks about the capitalism of bodies. The screen and the finger become the protagonists of this story. A still body that does not move and is connected through the fingerprint and the retina. Somehow, those of us who live far from our places of origin, live similar situations. Our closest and most intimate relationships are increasingly virtual and so is a large part of communication:  it takes place out of phase, partly because of different time zones, but also within the same city. Many people use WhatsApp audios as their main form of communication; and while the audio is taken in real-time, a phase shift in time is unavoidable. Bizarre communication channels are created that expand in time and space. How do you feel about this idea? Could your life be just a sample of the kind of society you live in, and how does it make you feel?

Reading this question, I feel that you are a bit pessimistic for this virtual world, and so are people in general. But I have gigantic gratitude to the internet and social media for expanding my world infinitely, which makes me relatively optimistic for my current situation. I’m a kind of platonic person who appreciates the soul and spiritual things more than bodily and physical things. On the internet, I think that I can touch the essence of a person or an object more directly, or less indirectly, through texts only. The kindness of people all over the world and the beauty of Romanian language, are a few examples. Having had several great experiences, I tend to see this virtual world more positively and optimistically, which shines through in my book.

And to me, one of the virtues of this virtual world is that it allows us to communicate mainly through writing. There is room to read people’s thoughts over and over again, and get face to face with them in silence allowing me to concentrate for many hours. To answer the questions you sent, I read and reread them, going through surprises and having fun writing the answers in Japanese at first and then translating them into English as the weeks go by, which is pure delight. It’s a luxury to take this interview through the internet and creating this document. It is as real as if the interview would have been taken in person. It fits perfectly into my life style. Yes indeed, my life may be just a sample of the kind of society we live in. I feel it’s cool.

This interview will be published first in Spanish, do you have any familiarity with Hispanic literature (Spain, Argentina, Mexico, etc.) or are you too far away to give it any thought? Do you think your writing may have some Latin influence, for example through Murakami or Cartarescu? Has American literature served as a beacon in your writing and your readings?

Oh why wouldn’t I have any familiarity with Hispanic literature! It is amongst the most exciting literatures in any languages! Especially Latin American literature is one of my biggest literary crushes along with Eastern European literature.  Let me name a few: “Alguien que anda por ahí” by Julio Cortázar, “La perra” by Pilar Quintana, “Nihonjin” by Oscar Nakasato or “Los laberintos insolados” by Marta Traba etc. Recently I read “Un verdor terrible” by Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut and this is an apocalyptic masterpiece about how science progresses with irredeemable sacrifices for the earth. I’m very much influenced by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and others.

But the most notable to me is Uruguayan literature. I got absolutely hooked by Latin American literature from the beginning because of fantastic short stories by Horacio Quiroga. Not to mention Felisberto Hernández or Mario Levrero. And I was devastated by contemporary ones like “El hermano mejor” by Daniel Mella, which is like poisoned ‘mate’ tea named anti-natalism. To me Uruguayan literature is one of the most eccentric and unparalleled within the Hispanic literature scene, or within any world literature.

The Hispanic literature which interests me the most right now is Equatoguianean literature. As you know, one of the official languages in Equatorial Guinea is Spanish and it is the used language in its literature, yet there is hardly any information about it in Japanese! Completely unknown, and thus all the more attractive to me. And recently I got to know that Spanish is also an official language in the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, although Arabic is used mainly. This Spanish is called español saharaui, so I wonder if there are people who write in it…

A post-work world

We see more and more young people turning down fulltime jobs because they decide to prioritize free time. In his latest book[6] Nick Srnicek talks about how the battle of the future will be to obtain more free time, a scarce and precious commodity. On the other hand, we see, at least in Tokyo, more and more older people still working, in supermarkets, construction sites, etc. The novel “Convenience Store Woman” by Sakaya Murata, portrays very well the life of these young people who decide not to follow the capitalist path. Do you also see this as a growing phenomenon? Is your generation looking for other ways of prosperity that are not attained through work?

Being from Japan and reading news about Japan from inside, I can’t imagine that this phenomenon is not growing. It leaves us a strong impression day by day, in different ways. I am a hikikomori, so my life is less capitalistic than average, even if I didn’t expect that a decade ago. Yes one is freer, but I’m not sure how sustainable it is. But if you stray from the capitalist path in Japan once, you can’t get back to it so easily. So you must continue walking this seemingly unsustainable path. It’s a very difficult situation. And I guess that people in that situation will become the ones who will continue working when they are older.

Both us and the older generation is forced into such a difficult situation while our high expectations are betrayed by society. The younger generation on the other hand will build their own life while they learn from our situation that it’s better to have lower expectations.  They will be more realistic and tough than us, which might, in turn, not be ideal or smart either.

 I have seen in an interview that you have sold 10.000 copies of your book in Japan. Did you expect this success? What do you owe this interest to?

No, it’s beyond my expectations. Romanian literature and Romanian language, sadly occupy just a small space in Japan, and I was completely anonymous. So, I didn’t think it would become such a success. Still, in order to subvert the initial disadvantages, I promoted it myself and communicated with readers on Twitter frequently. With such efforts, we achieved selling 10000 copies of my book and we still gradually sell to new readers. The Korean edition will come out soon, as said above. I hope that this version too will vouch for Romanian culture.

Acknowledgments

• First of all, to Tettyo Saito for putting up with my long and heavy questions and answering almost everything with patience and dedication.
• To Olivia Putyer, English translator, for providing me with some material in English.
• To Kathelijne Bonne, translator, who as always has worked hard to make the English edition understandable and readable for all audiences.
• To my husband, who supports me, reads me, and gives me a hard time. I love you.

Read more

• We Will Leave Japan Without Friends
• Sick of Being Lucky: Being a Woman in Japan
• Notes on Hiroshima
• The whole truth about housewives and expats in Japan
• Cities in books

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[1] En English is: “The story of how I, a ‘hikikomori’ who rarely leaves Chiba, became a novelist in Romanian without going aboard even once” published by Sayusha, 10 de febrero de 2023.

[2] Interview to Savater published in Cañete, Carlos y Grau Maite. Cioran: el pesimista seductor. Sirpus. 2007 (Own translation, no English version available)

[3] The book will be published by Korean publisher Bookhouse.

[4] Possibly title in English: “Short treaty about the animals which work from home”. No English version available.

[5] Sadin, Eric. La vie spectrale. Grasset. 2023. No English versión available.

[6] Srnicek, Nick. Hester, Ellen. After work. A history of the home and the fight from free time. Verso. 2023

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