People who talked to stuffed animals are nice

by Ao Omae

Translated from the Japanese by Emily Balitrieri

First published in 2023.

I think I have the first edition!!

Date read: Dec 2025

164 pages

Paperback

Novel set in ITC Stone Serif typeface, designed by Sumner Stone in 1987.

The novel is a compilation of four short stories.

Super quick read, maybe around 2-4 hours. Possible in one sitting. 
 To mirror, this post is a short one.

A quick note to all of you reading this 
 I write these notes to share a little something about the books that I read. Please do share your thoughts and what is it that you look forward to when you read these notes and what else would you like included! One thing I can think of is – so far I’ve covered only fiction. I can venture into covering non-fiction books. Which one would you like to read more about?

Thoughts

• Everything around you becomes something worth writing about. 


• It perhaps says something about things which might be deeply personal to the author.

• It took me a while to figure out what lens to read the story with – who am I supposed to read as. It is likely that that is intentional since the book is about gender dynamics, fluidity, sensitivity, and flux.

• A complicated phase in the lives of teenagers; discovering and coming to terms with their identity and the identities of others.

You’ll like this book if

• You like stuffed animals, plushies, toys

• You like creepy-cute

• You like melancholic short stories

• You are an extremely empathetic person

• You like Sayaka Murata’s books

• You like this peculiar style of writing which is not exactly magical realism but it is extremely fluid in terms of pushing the boundaries of imagination

• You like treading carefully

• You get heavily affected by what’s happening in the world around you

• You find yourself thinking about how fragile people’s relationship with the world is

• You live vicariously

One-word vocab booster

Gripe: complaining about something in a persistent/ irritating way

A few lines from the book (no spoilers)

Before she disappeared, she wrote fake news part time…

…she did feel guilty in her own way…

I prioritized that single moment when deciding my future.

It wrapped up with the message that it’s important to be yourself, and there was a scene partway through where both the man and the woman screamed their insecurities and rage at the sea.

“Yeah, there are some things you can say only to the sea.”

The peppy reply sounded forced, which gave me a bad feeling, and I started to cry.

The amount of money she could make was limited by the pace at which she could write, but there was no limit on the amount of guilt that could pile up.

If you write lies in an honest style, won’t you just trick more people, making everything even more irredeemable…?

I seemed to have discovered something, and it gave me a strange energy.

Even though the continuity of his life since then was unbroken, he wanted to distance himself from “that” self.

Sometimes, simplicity is almost harder to get across.

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