An Unconventional Way of Living

An Unconventional Way of Living is a nonfiction interview collection by Japanese-Chinese author Yoshii Shinobu, following her book Tokyo's Eight Square Meters. Produced by New Classic Culture and published by Wenhui Publishing House in February 2025, the book begins with the author's own situation: after graduating from university, she traveled abroad, moving through Chengdu, Taipei, and southern France without buying a home or holding a job, living at a slower pace than others for more than twenty years. After returning to Tokyo, she found herself in a highly aging Japanese society with worsening wealth inequality, where places outside the mainstream were becoming scarcer. "After breaking free from the grip of winning and losing, how should one walk one's path?" With this question, she spent seven years (starting in 2017) going into Japanese streets, markets, and small islands, interviewing twelve ordinary people who had left the mainstream career track, weathering the pandemic along the way and continuing to follow up on how her subjects changed. The people in the book are neither eccentrics nor hermits who require climbing mountains to meet; they might be your neighbors or the shopkeeper at the corner of a shopping street: Uda Tomoko, who quit her job at Japan's largest bookstore to run Japan's smallest secondhand bookstore on a small southern island; Takizawa Shuichi, a comedian who collects garbage on Tokyo streets by day and tells jokes in theaters at night; Okaki Keisuke, an architect who spent nineteen years pouring concrete by hand to build a building for "the next two hundred years"; Kashiwadori Yoshito, who single-handedly maintains a Chinese rock music database; Fukushima Atsushi, a photographer who shoots bento boxes and elderly people living alone; Tsuzuki Kyōichi, a photojournalist documenting ordinary lives; Wang Nan, founder of the Chinese biker gang "Noroken"; and Saburo Choji, a tattoo artist who uses his needle to depict Showa-era humanity and honor... Also included are two interview pieces on the areas around the U.S. military bases in Okinawa and on Fukushima. The book features over a hundred color photographs, with the cover using "finding your own chair" as a metaphor. Yoshii Shinobu does not judge or preach; she simply records ordinary people struggling, fumbling, retreating, and stepping forward again amid uncertainty, letting readers see possibilities beyond "lying flat" and "involution."