Aafter reading this Selena Gomez looked unearthly in a custom Ralph Lauren wedding dress, about how the Vitamix 5200 is a legend for a reason, and about how scientists made yogurt using ants, I feel bad enough about how much time I spent staring at inconsequential words and meaningless images on my small screen that I move on to the big screen that is my laptop. There I read that the heart of US President Donald Trump's wealth is his fast-growing cryptocurrency empire, and my friend is selling two tickets to Yung Lean. I'm getting tired. I pick up the phone again.
This recap of a recent Sunday is an addiction diary. I'm not the only one who feels tied to a glowing appendage that holds the secrets of the world. The average Canadian spends about seventy days a year on your smartphone collectively.
I'm not always like this; I love books almost as much as I have since I was a kid under the covers, where I definitely spent over seventy days reading a stack of young adult novels. But it's so easy to break the habit of reading before bed after a few nights spent on the phone.
In recent years, a literary genre has emerged that has exploded in popularity, seemingly in response to our sleazy leisure culture, which fetishizes the literary image while reducing the resources and opportunities to support the literary arts. Enter cozy lighting, an import from Japan and Korea that emphasizes feeling over meaning, setting over structure, and texture over depth. The stories are gentle and warm, temporarily removing the friction of modern life. I'm not sure that they are an antidote to the Internet, but only a copy of its hypnotic passivity. They are more like digital content than we think.
Cozy lighting has its own characteristics. There must be cats. There must be books in a book. Tea. Rain. Primorye. More cats. In fact, there are a lot of cats. As you read this, you may be imagining a lonely woman, wrapped in fleece blankets, with her own cat on her lap. Indeed, cozy lighting is feminine. What's more, its takeover by Western publishers is a new frontier in chick flicks.
The overseas markets for Japanese and Korean literature are booming. They were shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and were among the best. New York Times bestseller list. The Eastern approach to literature, which often prioritizes world-building over unfolding action, comes from a different storytelling tradition than our own. But the cozy approach is something special, and it was used as a way to say nothing.
Ait's someone fighting To divert my attention from algorithmic overstimulation, I dove into the coziness this fall to test my restorative abilities BookTok confident to me I would unlock. The typical format is a linked collection of short stories; people and places reappear, but the (understated) drama changes. place often it's some kind of business – a cafe or a convenience store, which in Japan means something more sacred than the shitty Circle K – and People are his clients. At Tenderness, a store anthropomorphized by Sonoko Machida. Convenience store by the seapublished in English in July this year, the automatic doors play “the gentle melody of a music box” and the night shift worker “can't tell you how happy and grateful” she is that locals choose to patronize the place.
Eat Blanket catsabout a cat rental service, but often cats serve as mere decoy, decorating the cover in an attempt to emulate the aesthetic packaging of an outstanding cozy book: Before the coffee gets cold Toshikazu Kawaguchi. First published in Japan in 2015, it reached North American readers in the fall of 2020, just as many of us were accepting our fate as perpetual pandemic hermits. It is now a series that has sold 8 million copies worldwide. Before the coffee gets cold also fits the paradigm of a neighboring subgenre: healing fiction. Funiculi Funicula customers sit at a designated table and travel back in time to reconnect and reverse their life's regrets – if they return early, you guessed it, the steam will leave their cup. These, too, are woven short stories created by a commercial site or worker—in this case, the enigmatic barista Kazu—a proxy therapist for our ambient melancholy.
Another: Happiness menu Published in October by Penguin Random House, Hisashi Kashiwai is the third in the popular series in which a quirky family of foodies is tasked with tracking down and accurately reproducing the dishes that haunt their customers. When they try scrambled eggs with fried rice or kake soba with sake-marinated fish, they are often transported back to childhood memories. They finish, pay, and gratefully pet the restaurant's cat, Sleepy, on the way out.
I know this all seems innocent, but reading Happiness menu it's essentially like consuming pornography. (“Food porn,” a millennial influencer would call it.) A sensory encounter designed to make us salivate. Much of the book is dialogue, and Chef Nagare describes his creations in great detail:
The fish to the left of Tachikui's large dish is nodoguro, simmered in soy. Next to it is a duck grilled with rock salt – a cross between a wild and domestic breed. And then the Seko crab meat was served in its shell with a tosazu vinegar dressing infused with mackerel. Below is deep fried tilefish with yuzu and chili paste. I fried the scales separately for extra crispiness. Next to it, in Imari's small bowl, is an assortment of steamed winter vegetables: kintoki carrots, shogoin and sugukina turnips, and negi red onion. Delicious with a dash of mustard – a bit like oden stew.
It's vibration-based prose designed to envelop you—a mild thrill or linguistic ASMR, not because the prose is great, but rather because it's lulling, the literary equivalent of watching someone cut butter on TikTok. Episodic, formulaic, reliably satisfying.
Beyond sensations, reading coziness is inseparable from the digital experience of interacting with Asia at a distance. Twenty-three Japanese words were added to the dictionary last year. Oxford English Dictionary. More than half are related to food or cooking. What the reduction also did was isekaior portal fantasy, a genre of fiction involving the transport or reincarnation of a character into a strange other world. The long-standing fetishization of Japan as a utopia has reached its zenith with completely immersive social media. It's not easy weeaboo more. The number of foreign visitors to the country hit a record high in 2024 as a weak yen attracted tourists. analysis Out of over a trillion data points, Japan has more influence on the US than any other country.
The textures of an ordinary store seem like magic to the voyeur because the whole concept of Japan is interpreted as isekai. In his didactic manual How to write wellWilliam Zinsser declared: “Disorder is the disease of American literature.” But this is not American writing. This is Eastern writing translated for a Western audience with an apparently insatiable appetite for Asia. Happiness menu luxuriously rich, but food porn excerpts don't count mess because such a description is the essence of the text. There is a problematic tension between intention and perception: what Japanese and Korean authors create as moments of quiet reflection are consumed as instant gratification in the West.
“In the West, we tend to be very black and white. Whereas in Japanese books there's a lot more gray area. It's not as judgmental,” translator Ginny Tapley Takemori told me. She translated Convenience store woman Sayaka Murata's unflappable pleasure and surprising global bestseller. “Often Japanese novels do not have a satisfying ending. [At first] It was very confusing for me to be left in limbo, not knowing what I was supposed to think about what had just happened. But what's really surprising is that they don't tell me what to think. I need to think about this instead. It's more like life.”
It didn't take long for the English-speaking world to borrow the popular cozy label and add its own twist – that is, adding sex where there had never been sex before. While Japanese titles rely on ambiguity, sentimentality, drag and angst, the Western approach gets straight to the point: a café owner having an orgasm in a leafy alley. For us there is no catharsis without completion. Sex scene in an alley from the coziest native of the English-speaking world. Pumpkin Spice Cafe Laurie Gilmore, pseudonym referring to the television show Gilmore GirlsEssentially, the book is fan fiction. Transforming this raunchy novel allows the author to ride the tidal wave of another genre – according to the author. New York TimesSales of printed novels have more than doubled in the past few years.
Only cozy novels published since 2023 include Spell Shopcottage romance; Bookstores and Bonedustcozy PG fantasy; Done and dusted for horse girls; and five offshoots of Laurie Gilmore from Cinnamon Bun Bookstore To Strawberry Patch Pancake House. All of them reached hundreds of thousands of readers – numbers that a modern debut writer in the genre of fiction cannot even dream of. In an interview with Cosmopolitan UK, Gilmour celebrates success Pumpkin Spice Cafe: “The book, for some reason, seems to grab people's attention. I received a very nice message this morning from someone who said they have ADHD and dyslexia and had trouble getting into the book, but were able to get through mine.”
Let me suggest a reason. Read Pumpkin Spice Cafe“TikTok Shop Book of the Year 2024” and other cozy articles are practically the equivalent of being on social media. Short and clear chapters, pleasant beautiful faces, a steady drop of serotonin disguised as sincerity. But the humble paperback book is not considered as bad for humanity as time wasted on the Internet. While internet users install app-blocking extensions to prevent the awkward loop described earlier, reading remains culturally coded as a virtue, no matter how mind-numbing and anti-intellectual the content is. Cozy lighting is indulgent without being embarrassing.
According to book scout Nina Relich, that's exactly what's selling. “The core reader gravitates toward extremely sincere and honest perceptions of our most shameful curiosities and desires,” she tells me. “There's so much shame in the literary world. It's what makes us all very cool. It's the exact opposite of the spirit of the commercial novel, which is like, 'This is cool.' It makes you feel good. It turns you on. And it makes me [the author] a lot of money.”
The Western dominance of Cozy Lit looks less like intercultural exchange and more like clever and cynical co-optation. (Even though cats and blankets are considered feminine, many of the popular writings are written by men, a clever adaptation to what they think women want.) Affection becomes a product of lifestyle. It remains within the realm of safe fantasy to click on the next suggested Pinterest image reminiscent of a Christian Autumn girl, rather than imagining something completely new. I don't feel so different when I finish cozy than when I reach the end of my Instagram feed. The feeling of consumption is the same. The cozy lighting creates a still life look but is essentially scrolling.
Julieta Caballero is an illustrator at The Walrus.
