Interview With Author Haruto Mori
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I write under the name Haruto Mori. I grew up between two countries, and I have always been the kind of person who keeps a notebook of words that don't translate well — words for small things that English doesn't quite have a name for. Oubaitori, my first book, came out of that notebook. It is a 90-page book about attention, comparison, and a Japanese word for blooming on your own time. I'm working on a second one now, on a different word.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
Oubaitori: The Japanese Art of Blooming When the Feed Never Sleeps. Oubaitori is a word made of four trees — plum, cherry, peach, and a fourth less familiar in English. Each blooms in its own month. The tradition that carries the word does not rank them.
I started writing about it after a quiet evening when I caught myself comparing my year to someone else's curated highlight reel for the third time that week. I wanted to read a book about that exact feeling, and I could not find one in English that matched what I was looking for. So I wrote toward it.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I write the first draft longhand. Pencil, not pen. There is something about the friction of graphite on paper that makes me slow down enough to hear what I actually mean before I start typing it. Most of my edits happen in the gap between the notebook and the keyboard.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
Beth Kempton's Wabi Sabi was a gentle revelation when I read it. Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing taught me that attention is a moral act. Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism is more practical but lives in the same room. Further back: Dōgen, Kakuzō Okakura's The Book of Tea, the haiku of Buson and Issa. I read more poetry than self-help.
What are you working on now?
A second book, on mono no aware — the Japanese aesthetic of finding beauty in transience. The cherry blossom is the obvious example, but the word reaches into smaller things too. A used coffee cup. The last warm afternoon of October. The way a child's voice gets quieter when they are about to fall asleep.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
I am still new to this side of it, honestly. What has felt right so far is to find readers in the spaces where the book's adjacent ideas already live — places where Wabi Sabi and How to Do Nothing are already being discussed. The harder lesson is that promotion only really works if the book itself can be read in two hours and the reader closes it feeling slightly lighter. Everything else follows from that.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Write the book you would press into a friend's hands at the right moment. Not the book you think will sell. Those are sometimes the same book, but you cannot reverse-engineer the second one from the first.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
A teacher of mine said once: "You don't have to be the first one to bloom." I didn't understand it for a long time. Oubaitori is partly an attempt to understand it.
What are you reading now?
Mary Oliver's Devotions, slowly, in the morning. Pico Iyer's The Art of Stillness. And rereading parts of Kakuzō Okakura's The Book of Tea — there is a passage about flowers that I keep coming back to.
What’s next for you as a writer?
The mono no aware book first. Then a third one on the Japanese tradition of intentional incompleteness — the idea that a thing left a little undone is more alive than a thing finished. After that, I don't know yet. The plan is to keep the imprint small and the books quiet.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
The Tao Te Ching, in Stephen Mitchell's translation.
Mary Oliver's Devotions, for the poems.
Wabi Sabi by Beth Kempton — because if I were stranded I would want a friend's voice in the room.
And Pico Iyer's The Art of Stillness, because by then I would probably need a fourth.
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