The bottleneck to reading more is the spirit.

By spirit I mean the soul; the mind; the unity of intellectual and emotional faculties; the glue that sticks past, present, and future together; "the relation that relates itself to itself".

It's an oft-repeated phrase in the language learning community: "Read more". If you want to improve your Japanese, you should read manga and watch anime in Japanese. This is self-evidently true. You can only acquire authentic vocabulary through repeated exposure to native material.

The topic of this short piece, however, is not language acquisition strategy. Rather, I'd like to explore the phenomenon of "reading block" -- the friction of wanting to read but finding oneself immobilized before a book.

last updated: 3 months ago

That means, I last wrote on this subject in March 2026.

Not much has changed in my standpoint on this matter. If you can't read, you're suffering from spiritual indigestion. The spirit is having difficulty digesting the word.

If the problem is spiritual, then the solution is spiritual too. That is to say, you need to slow down with your word intake. Chew slowly, let the digestive fluid take action. Or perhaps even stop new intake. Let the heart digest the words taken first. Questions should arise. We have it good today in the age of artificial intelligence assistants. If there are questions you're embarrassed to ask your friends, then AI is your friend too -- you can talk about all kinds of things with them -- with the caveat that robots have their own limitations. Simmer on the thought. Maybe think about which friend is well-suited to discuss the matter, if talking to AI makes you uncomfortable. In my experience, Claudia has never refused my advances, but maybe that's because I have the proper guardrails in mind. If there's no one you can talk with (really?), then consider writing a blog. Not in the sense of shitting up the semi-public discord chat with your undigested thought. But actually setting up a weblog. Your personal public diary. Think your thoughts through, and make a logpiece out of them.

Did I succeed in exploring the phenomenon of "reading block"? Reading block is another word for spiritual indigestion. The remedy is spiritual intercourse.

But that's just half the answer. Maybe the reality is that life in the 3D realm is taking up your time and energy. Sore nara, shikata ga nai. Gotta clean up the house so you could have peace and read. My apartment room is still a mess from moving in March 2026, by the way. Oh well.

June 14, 2026 (Sunday) 13:44 JST