I gave my notice on a Wednesday in late autumn, in a small meeting room on the eighth floor of a publishing house in Jimbocho where I had worked for eleven years. The senior editor across the table — a kind man who had been my mentor since I was twenty-six — listened to my prepared speech without interrupting, then closed his notebook and asked, in Japanese, are you certain. I said I was. He looked out the window at the rain on the rooftops of the booksellers' district and said, after a long pause, that he had expected this conversation eventually. We bowed. I went back to my desk and edited a manuscript about postwar architecture for the rest of the afternoon, because the manuscript was due to the typesetter on Friday and the manuscript did not care about my career.
I have been asked, more than once, why I left. The honest answer is harder to give than the polished one. The polished answer involves words like vocation and creative independence and building something of my own, and those words are not exactly false. The honest answer is smaller. I left for the morning tea. I left for the walk to the post office. I left for the kind of slow writing that the partner track did not have room for. I left, in other words, for ikigai in the actual Japanese sense — the small daily reasons — rather than for ikigai in the Venn diagram sense, which I am not sure I believed in even then.
The job I was leaving
For context, the job was a good one. Eleven years at a respected literary publisher, four years on the senior editorial team, a year and a half from a partnership offer that was, by every external measure, the answer to the question I had been told to ask in my twenties. I edited writers I admired. I was paid well enough. The colleagues I worked with were the colleagues I would have chosen. None of the standard reasons for leaving applied. There was no crisis, no falling-out, no health scare, no dramatic disillusionment with the industry. I liked the industry.
What I had stopped liking — slowly, over about two years — was the shape of my days. The mornings disappeared into email by 8:15. Lunch was eaten at the desk three days out of five. The afternoons were meetings about manuscripts I was not yet allowed to read, because the deal was still in negotiation and the agent was being delicate. I went home at 8:30 most evenings, sometimes later. I read manuscripts on the train. I had a flat in Yanaka with a small kitchen I rarely cooked in and a window I rarely sat by. The job was filling the days, and the days, increasingly, did not feel like mine.
The small experiment
The decision did not arrive as a decision. It arrived as a small experiment, conducted entirely in private, that I did not initially recognise as the beginning of anything. In the spring before I quit, I started keeping a one-line evening journal — the same kind of journal I have written about in the context of the kakeibo practice, but for a different purpose. The single question, every night, was: what about today was worth it. One line. No more.
I kept this for six months. I did not show it to anyone. I did not discuss it with my therapist. I did not even, at first, recognise what I was doing. I was just writing one line a night before bed, in a small notebook by the lamp.
What I noticed, when I read the six months back in a single sitting one evening in October, was that the entries fell into two unequal piles. About four-fifths of the entries described things that had nothing to do with my job. The morning cup of tea on the days I had remembered to make it properly. A thirty-minute walk along the Sumida river on a Sunday. A long conversation with my mother on the phone. A meal cooked from scratch on a quiet Saturday. Reading half an hour of a novel before sleep. The other one-fifth described the job — a particular sentence I had unlocked in a manuscript, an evening with a writer whose work I loved, the closing of a difficult negotiation. Both piles were real. The proportions, when I saw them in writing, were the thing that startled me.
What the journal was actually showing me
I want to be careful not to overdramatise this. The journal did not tell me to quit. The journal told me, more modestly, that the things I was finding most worth my days were almost all things that lived around the edges of my job rather than inside it. The job had eaten the centre of the day, and the small things that were producing the felt sense of a worthwhile life — what Mieko Kamiya, in her 1966 book, called ikigai-kan, the inner weather of meaningfulness — were being squeezed into the corners.
This was not a complaint about the job in the moral sense. The job was the job. It would have asked the same of any other senior editor. The question was whether I wanted to keep arranging my one life around the corners of someone else's centre. By late October, the answer had become, quietly and without drama, no.
I want to flag that this is not the answer the four-circle ikigai diagram would have produced. The diagram, applied to my situation, would have told me that I had already arrived. I was paid well, I was good at the work, I loved books, the world arguably needed careful editors. Four circles, all green. The diagram could not see the small daily problem because the small daily problem is invisible at the scale the diagram operates on. I wrote about this mismatch at greater length in a separate essay, but the short version is: the diagram answers a question I no longer found useful.
What I left for
People expect, when an editor in her late thirties leaves a publishing house, that she is leaving for a clear next thing. A book deal, a new venture, a move abroad. The truth in my case is more modest and, I think, more interesting. I left to write more slowly. I left to keep my mornings. I left to start a small publication — what would eventually become Mindful Yen — that I could run at the pace I wanted to live at, even if it took two or three years to grow into anything financially serious.
The first six months after leaving were not glamorous. I had savings, I had a flat that was paid for, I had no children, and I had spent eleven years carefully not living above my means. (The kakeibo had something to do with this; I have written about how to start that practice elsewhere.) I drafted essays in the mornings, walked in the afternoons, taught a small editing workshop one evening a week to keep some income coming in, and slept eight hours most nights for the first time in a decade. The Substack started in month four. The first essay had eleven readers, eight of whom I had emailed personally.
The first year was financially leaner than my publishing salary by a long way. I had expected this. What I had not expected was how quickly the daily ledger of small worthwhile things changed shape. By month three, almost every line in the journal described something that had happened that morning — the tea, the writing, the walk, the slow lunch, the conversation with a neighbour at the corner shop. The job-shaped pile had not gone to zero, because I was still teaching and freelance editing, but it had moved from being the thin pile to being the appropriate-sized pile. The proportions had inverted.
What I would tell someone considering the same step
I am wary of giving advice on this, because the decision to leave a stable career is not, in my view, a decision that benefits from advice. It benefits from clarity, which advice tends to muddy. What I will offer, instead, is two observations, both small.
The first is that the journal — the one-line, before-bed, no-rules version — was the most useful instrument I had. Not because it told me what to do, but because, after six months, it gave me an honest read of where my actual ikigai was living. Most of us cannot see this in the moment. We can see it in writing, with a few months of hindsight. If you are considering a change and have not done this practice, I would recommend it before any other framework. It costs nothing. It takes ninety seconds a night. The clarity it produces is hard to get any other way.
The second is that the version of ikigai that helped me make this decision was not the four-circle career-design version. It was the small daily one — the morning tea, the walk, the slow writing. If I had been waiting for a grand intersection of passion, mission, vocation, and profession to reveal itself, I would still be in Jimbocho. The grand intersection never came. What came was the slow, repeated noticing that the small things on my evening list were not getting the room they needed inside my old shape of life. That noticing was enough.
Subscribers to the Mindful Yen Substack have followed this transition more closely; I write occasional notes from the second-year-of-this-life vantage. I have no plan to romanticise it. The income is still smaller than the salary was. The trade has been worth it, and the worth shows up not in any dramatic moment but in a thousand small evenings that now belong to me.
Final thought
The senior editor who heard my notice that Wednesday afternoon retired the following spring. He sent me a short letter, written by hand, on the stationery of the firm. He said he had taken up morning walks. He said he had begun to understand, late, what he had been missing. He did not use the word ikigai. He did not need to. The letter was, itself, the thing being described.