“It pains me to give this book just one star,” the young woman from Austria wrote in her Goodreads review of The Way of Nagomi by Ken Mogi. “I was so curious about this book, but reading it was really just painful.”
Her complaints? For one, in his “love letter to Japanese culture,” Mogi introduces “too many Japanese words” for her taste. Furthermore, he “mainly describes how nagomi manifests in life, not WHAT it is.” And finally, she says, there is “no trace of tangible tips for a better life thanks to this philosophy.” In the end, she was “rarely so disappointed” and would “absolutely not” recommend the book.
You know what always pains me? When I see a great book get a bad review because the person read it with the wrong glasses on. That’s what happened here, and that’s why, for once in a blue moon, I went out of my way to leave a comment the young lady will most likely never see.
The Way of Nagomi is a beautiful book that explains the titular concept, which describes a state of calm, relaxed harmony. Covering various areas of life, like food, creativity, and relationships, Ken Mogi then shares plenty of anecdotes to show the many shapes nagomi might take. After reading the book, you’ll have a decent gut sense of what nagomi feels like in all kinds of situations—and that is worth infinitely more than yet another ten-step how-to manual.
But that’s what we look for, isn’t it? Our Western minds are primed for easily digestible action items and authoritative calls to action. At least, that’s what the young lady seems to have wanted. She was wearing her US self-help glasses while reading this book, and so inevitably, she was let down.
Ironically, the entire point of ideas like ikigai, wabi-sabi, and nagomi is to get us to understand that life is not black-and-white, and that’s precisely why our Western approach to handling challenges so often fails us—because life is not a problem you can solve with minimal explanations and three-point bullet lists.
This is a fundamental theme of Japanese philosophy, and so a real book about Japan from a real Japanese author will never be littered with the kind of instruction we might expect from a typical New York Times Bestseller—because that would go against the very culture the author wants to reveal to us.
“Don’t try to approach everything in life with a five-step plan,” Japanese philosophy says. It’s about accepting that the world is full of uncertainty, that everything is connected, and that small impulses might unfold their big effect much later or elsewhere in life. That’s why books like The Way of Nagomi are less like a recipe from the doctor and more like a beautiful painting you look at: In the end, you don’t know exactly how or why, but it moved you, and that’s the part that counts.
I don’t know if the girl from Austria will ever re-read the book or a similar one with an open mind and without assumptions. But I do know that you can’t bully a book into giving you exactly what you want or expect. All you can do is read it and be ready to receive whatever it has to teach you—or not.
Just as with people, there are two versions of every book: The one we want it to be, and the one we actually end up reading. In both cases, the only way to truly see what’s ultimately there—for us to learn, to discover, even to marvel at—is to wear the right glasses when we engage.