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Book Review: Ikigai
Oct. 25th, 2025 05:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
huxleyenneFull Title: 生き甲斐 Ikigai: Giving Every Day Meaning and Joy
Author: Yukari Mitsuhashi
First Published: In Great Britain by Kyle Books, an Imprint of Octopus Publishing Group LtD, 2018
"The Japanese word ikigai is formed of two Japanese characters, or kanji: 'iki' [生き], meaning life, and 'gai' [甲斐], meaning value or worth. Ikigai, then, is the value of life, or happiness in life. Put simply, it's the reason you get up in the morning." - That's the summary on the back of the book.
This is a quick and thoughtful read. I'm a distractable person with a wandering mind, and it still only took me about an hour to reread this cover to cover. Here are some thoughts.
Call it morbid curiosity or a guilty pleasure, but I read self-help books sometimes, including bad ones. It's a good idea to take life advice books with a grain of salt, and perhaps Ikigai is no different. Even so, I like this book. Nothing felt out of place or without meaning. There are no religious undertones that I noticed, nor does the author have the attitude that your purpose in life is to make money. She does her best to show the reader what the "value of life" means to her, and the anecdotes she used from others are brief, but effective.
I think perhaps my favorite thing the author said was toward the end, on page 89: "I think having ikigai ensures that I will never be bored until the day I die. Maybe that's happiness. You keep chasing your ikigai and one day you just die." This made me think of hobbies we passionately engage with and why we have them. If I had to call anything my ikigai, it would probably be writing fanfiction.
A book like this has its place if you need a quick boost, or moment to think deeply about what you love and why it gets you out of bed in the morning. It doesn't have to be a job or family, though it can be those things. It just has to be true, and yours. Reading this feels meditative, in a way.
Author: Yukari Mitsuhashi
First Published: In Great Britain by Kyle Books, an Imprint of Octopus Publishing Group LtD, 2018
"The Japanese word ikigai is formed of two Japanese characters, or kanji: 'iki' [生き], meaning life, and 'gai' [甲斐], meaning value or worth. Ikigai, then, is the value of life, or happiness in life. Put simply, it's the reason you get up in the morning." - That's the summary on the back of the book.
This is a quick and thoughtful read. I'm a distractable person with a wandering mind, and it still only took me about an hour to reread this cover to cover. Here are some thoughts.
Call it morbid curiosity or a guilty pleasure, but I read self-help books sometimes, including bad ones. It's a good idea to take life advice books with a grain of salt, and perhaps Ikigai is no different. Even so, I like this book. Nothing felt out of place or without meaning. There are no religious undertones that I noticed, nor does the author have the attitude that your purpose in life is to make money. She does her best to show the reader what the "value of life" means to her, and the anecdotes she used from others are brief, but effective.
I think perhaps my favorite thing the author said was toward the end, on page 89: "I think having ikigai ensures that I will never be bored until the day I die. Maybe that's happiness. You keep chasing your ikigai and one day you just die." This made me think of hobbies we passionately engage with and why we have them. If I had to call anything my ikigai, it would probably be writing fanfiction.
A book like this has its place if you need a quick boost, or moment to think deeply about what you love and why it gets you out of bed in the morning. It doesn't have to be a job or family, though it can be those things. It just has to be true, and yours. Reading this feels meditative, in a way.