One Saturday evening, we decided to walk to a book store in Eindhoven (Boekhandel van Piere) to look for a copy of Nexus since I finished it in e-book format and Ja wants a hard copy. I like the design of this bookshop with multiple level of spaces but I’ve never bought a book there. We were customers of the underground cafe 2 or 3 times. I rarely bought a book since what I find interesting to read can hardly be found in the bookstore - either too old or too specific. From the outside display, we could see “Butter” probably being popular or being promoted. The cover was eye-catching but I didn’t care to look at because I didn’t want to risk reading not-so-good books.
A few minutes before closing, we didn’t get the Nexus because it was only available in a hardcover. Ja got “Butter” after a long hesitation. Aside from a nice cover and Japanese writer which interested me a bit, I didn’t pay much attention
By the book, we bought probably 4 of real French butter from La Grade Epicerie de Paris when we were on a trip to Paris with Duke. One that was extraordinary tasty to me was Vanilla butter from Maison Bordier. Truly creamy and I could sense the sweetness while it wasn’t actually sweeten. I started to eat a piece of cold butter with bread / toast like how Rob ate his raisin bread with butter as a dessert every lunch in Veghel. I used to think the only way to eat butter was to melt and spread on toasts.
This book is really fun to read, thrilling and very hard to put it away. For me who used to study and live in Tokyo, the scene of this story, the culture makes me feel familiar. The Japanese author could pick out what’s unique from the Japanese society. I feel the tension as the story progresses. Like a good fiction, I feel it’s much more than reading a story of someone, a whole lot of life lessons to be learnt. Reading fiction to me became almost like seeing life progress in the simulator. In the era of AI when everything is possible by asking the machine, what left to one’s life is probably human-to-human friendship.