Reading Books Like Falling in Love

I am picking up Hiroshi Homura's essays one after another and reading them with obsession.

Meals on Nights Without You
World Tone-Deaf
Hello, Are You My Soulmate?
Nyokki
Nyonyokki
The Eve of Plastic Surgery
Let's Go Home Now
The Day I Respected a Stray Cat
Revolving Doors, One by One

I read 'Meals on Nights Without You' while standing in a bookstore, and it was so good that I ended up reading eight books in a row over the past two weeks. I am surprised myself.

The words Hiroshi Homura creates scoop up the 'truths' and 'sparkles' that seem to just pass us by but are definitely scattered in this world, and he spreads them out before my eyes like a magic trick.
The feelings I once loved but had forgotten—both this one and that one—are all here. The words that make me think that are all here. I understand the feelings of the girls who fall in love with Hiroshi Homura.

Words shine there like magic, and all the fears and anxieties I held during my youth are affirmed, beginning to twinkle and glow. I love the episodes about Yumiko Oshima that Hiroshi Homura writes, and I read them over and over again.

I read books as if I am falling in love with the words.
Time passes in the blink of an eye, and I become obsessed with the book, caught in the same euphoria as being in love. Driven by the desire to know more, I start searching for the author's other books one after another, unable to stop my eyes from following them. Just like Hiroshi Homura, who reacts to the very letters of the name Oshima.

This episode, which I recognize from my own life, felt funny and nostalgic, as if I were looking at myself in my twenties when I still lived in Tokyo.
Back then, whenever I found the name Yumiko Oshima at a used bookstore, I would pick up any manga or old magazine, and with a heart fluttering slightly, I would cherish it and carry it home, feeling as if I had time-traveled to the era when it was published.

What kind of girls are the ones who fall in love with Hiroshi Homura? Reading the stories of the girls Hiroshi Homura fell in love with in his essays, I feel the possibility that the girls who appear in Yumiko Oshima's manga might actually exist in reality, and my heart races as I read.
The story about chanting the script for Yumiko Oshima's 'Twilight is the Hour of the Demon' with a girl in a love hotel bed felt just like the world of a Yumiko Oshima manga.

Under the spell of Hiroshi Homura and Yumiko Oshima's words, the ordinary world changes as if I am dreaming. The line between reality and dreams becomes blurred, but it is so comfortable that I cannot go back.
The dream-like world becomes so real that I feel it is fine if I never return, and while remaining in the real world, I lose track of which one is the truth.
Reading a book is like bending the real world and changing the very world I have been living in, and once you realize that, you cannot help but keep reading books.

Carrying the words I have fallen in love with like a charm, I take my book and try bending the real world once again today.