What makes you create?

The other day, a dear friend of mine—someone who reads a lot and always sees the world in such a delicate and beautiful way—found a book for me. It was an old, rare, out-of-print Japanese edition of a book by Françoise Sagan, someone I’ve loved since I was a teenager.

He said he just happened to come across it at a second-hand bookstore.

We were sitting together in a café somewhere in Japan, sometime in late spring.

Soft light poured through wide windows. The café smelled like old wood, and the whole place carried the scent of summer. It felt like a scene out of a storybook.

Over a cup of sharply sour coffee, we were just catching up for the first time after a while, then he handed me the book, along with a few other lovely collections of poems and essays.

“Give them back someday maybe”

You have no idea how excited I was. This Sagan book was something I had been wanting to read for years. I couldn’t even find the English edition or the original French version back in Canada.

Why the Japanese one still existed?? I don’t know—but somehow, it found its way.

I first encountered Sagan when I was a teenager. I remember the moment she bumped into my life so vividly.

Reading her felt like finally finding my first true friend in my life.

She understood the parts of me that felt too strange or too quiet for the world. She loved people—deeply, almost too much—but always carried a kind of loneliness no one could quite understand. She wasn’t afraid to speak about life and love in bold, dramatic, beautiful words. She didn’t hide her sudden shifts of feeling.

Also! She was obsessed with speed, again, just like me. I really thought I’d found my soul friend.

Of course, I’m not like her in every aspect. I don’t gamble. I’m Japanese, not French. I work 9 to 5.

And honestly, unfortunately, I’m probably more serious—and more boring—than she ever was.

This book is a collection of her essays about the things she loved. I was reading it bit by bit on my way back to Canada.

In one chapter, she writes about her favourite books and says something that stopped me in my tracks:

“To fully feel my own existence, I had to let someone else live in my place. That is, I needed to read about someone else living.”

I’ve always felt like I don’t remember my own story of my life very clearly.

Maybe it’s because it is my own life. Because I live too earnestly, too intensely, always out of breath.

The memories I do have feel like fragments—bright, odd pieces that never quite form a whole. So much detail, but no summary.

Like a flash of sunlight through a train window. Like the tear-streaked face of my little sister, seen for just a second through glass. Like those tiny casual words from someone and his cool distant eyes that passed so lightly but stays so long. Like the sound of soft rain after he left.

Was it snowing outside the last time we spoke?

When he told me he loved me for the first time, did he hold my hand?

And the more I try to remember, the more things fade and distort. Like a sachet—each time you open it, the scent gets lighter. It mixes the smell of your room, shelves, the air you breathe, before you even notice. Eventually, all that’s left is a soft, gentle feeling with no clear shape.

But maybe that’s what life is. Moments that leave behind traces. Beautiful things that pass through us. Tiny, important pieces I don’t want to forget.

Things I hope not to lose—though probably I will. Maybe I already have. Maybe one day I won’t even think of them anymore.

And yet, every time I come across some small, beautiful thing, I feel a quiet urge to hold onto it. To write it down. Sometimes somehow it even makes me want to cry.

All the beauty and tenderness I’ve been lucky enough to witness—I feel like I have a quiet duty to capture them.

Hey artists, what makes you create?