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How “Cozy Lit” Became the Latest and Most Shameless Form of Digital Escapism
After reading that Selena Gomez looked ethereal in a custom Ralph Lauren wedding dress, that the Vitamix 5200 is a legend for a reason, and that scientists made a yogurt using ants, I feel sufficiently bad about myself because of how much time I have spent staring at inconsequential words and meaningless images on my little screen that I transition to the big screen that is my laptop. There, I read that the heart of United States president Donald Trump’s wealth is a rapidly growing cryptocurrency empire, and my friend is selling two tickets to Yung Lean. I grow weary. I pick up my phone again.
This summary of a recent Sunday afternoon is a diary of addiction. I’m not alone in feeling like I am tethered to a glowing appendage that contains the secrets to the world. The average Canadian spends about seventy days per year on their smartphone in aggregate.
I am not always like this; I love books in basically the same way that I have since I was a child under the covers, where I certainly spent more than seventy days reading a stockpile of young adult novels. But it is so easy to slip out of the habit of reading before bed after a few nights of phone time instead.
In recent years, a literary genre emerged and exploded in popularity, seemingly in direct response to our slovenly leisure culture that fetishizes appearing literary just as it slashes resources and opportunities to bolster the literary arts. Enter cozy lit, an import from Japan and Korea that prioritizes feeling over meaning, setting over structure, and texture over depth. The stories are gentle and warm, temporarily eliminating the friction of contemporary life. I’m not convinced they’re antidotes to the internet so much as replication of its hypnotic passivity. They are more akin to digital content than we know.
Cozy lit has its tropes. There should be cats. There should be books in the book. Tea. Rain. The seaside. More cats. There are actually so many cats. Reading this, you might be picturing a woman alone, swaddled in fleece blankets, her own cat on her lap. Indeed, cozy lit is feminized. And more than that, its absorption by Western publishing is the new frontier of chick lit.
The foreign markets for Japanese and Korean literature are booming writ large. They’re shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and hitting the New York Times bestseller list. The Eastern approach to literature—often prioritizing worldbuilding over action enfolding—comes from a different storytelling tradition than our own. But the cozy approach is something specific, and it’s been co-opted as a way to say nothing.
As someone fighting to wrest my attention back from algorithmic overstimulation, I dove into cozies this fall to test the restorative powers BookTok assured me I would unlock. The typical format is a linked story collection; people and places reappear but the (understated) drama changes up. The place is often a business of some kind—a cafe or a convenience store, which, in Japan, means something more sacred than a shitty Circle K—and the people are its customers. At Tenderness, a store anthropomorphized by Sonoko Machida’s The Convenience Store by the Sea, published in English this July, the automatic doors play a “gentle music-box melody,” and the night-shift clerk “can’t tell you how happy and grateful” it makes her that locals choose to patronize this location.
There’s The Blanket Cats, about a feline rental service, but often, the cats function simply as bait, gracing a cover in an attempt to ape the aesthetic package of a pre-eminent cozy book: Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. First published in Japan in 2015, it came to North American readers in fall 2020, right around when many of us had accepted a fate of perpetual hermitdom during the pandemic. Now a series that has sold a reported 8 million copies worldwide, Before the Coffee Gets Cold also fits the paradigm of the adjacent sub-genre: healing fiction. Customers of Funiculi Funicula sit at a particular table and travel back in time to repair relationships and reverse their life’s regrets—as long as they return before, you guessed it, the steam has left their cup. These, too, are braided short stories anchored by a commercial site or a labourer—here it’s the enigmatic barista Kazu—a proxy therapist for our ambient melancholy.
One more: Menu of Happiness by Hisashi Kashiwai, published in October by an imprint of Penguin Random House, is the third in a popular series in which a quirky foodie family is tasked with hunting down and exactly replicating the dishes that haunt their customers. When they taste the omelette over fried rice, or the kake soba topped with fish marinated in sake lees, they are transported, often to a childhood memory. They finish and pay and gratefully pet the restaurant cat Drowsy on their way out.
I know this all seems innocent, but reading Menu of Happiness is basically like consuming pornography. (“Food porn,” the millennial influencer would call it.) A sensory encounter meant to make us salivate. Much of the book is dialogue, and Chef Nagare describes his creations at extreme length:
The fish on the left of the large Tachikui dish is soy-simmered nodoguro. Next to that is duck grilled with rock salt—a cross of wild and domestic breeds. And then Seko crabmeat served in its shell, with a bonito-infused tosazu vinegar dressing. Below those you have the deep-fried tilefish, with a yuzu and chili pepper paste. I fried the scales separately, for extra crunch. Next to that, in the small Imari bowl, is a selection of steamed winter vegetables: Kintoki carrot, Shogoin and Sugukina turnips, and red negi onion. Nice with a dab of mustard—a bit like when you have them in oden stew.This is vibes-based prose, meant to wash over you—a gentle titillation or linguistic ASMR, not because the prose is magnificent but rather it’s lulling, the literary equivalent of watching someone slice butter on TikTok. Episodic, formulaic, reliably satisfying.
Beyond the feeling, reading a cozy is inextricable from the digitally mediated experience of interacting with Asia from afar. Last year, twenty-three Japanese words were added to the Oxford English Dictionary. More than half relate to food or cooking. What also made the cut was isekai, or portal fantasy, a fiction genre involving a character’s transportation or reincarnation to a strange other world. The long-time fetishization of Japan as utopia has reached a fever pitch with wholly immersive social media. It’s not just the weeaboos anymore. In 2024, international visitors to the country reached a record high as a weak yen drew tourists, and according to a recent analysis of more than a trillion data points, Japan has more influence on the US than any other country.
The textures of the average convenience store feel like magic to the voyeur because the whole concept of Japan is interpreted as isekai. In his didactic how-to, On Writing Well, William Zinsser declared, “Clutter is the disease of American writing.” But this is not American writing. It is Eastern writing translated for a Western audience with an apparently insatiable appetite for Asia. Menu of Happiness is sumptuously rich, but the food-porn passages do not count as clutter because such description is the substance of the text. There’s a problematic tension between intention and reception: what Japanese and Korean authors craft as moments of quiet reflection are consumed in the West as instant gratification.
“In the West we tend to be very black and white. Whereas in Japanese books, there’s much more of a gray area. It’s not so judgmental,” translator Ginny Tapley Takemori told me. She translated Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, a deadpan delight and a surprising global bestseller. “Often Japanese novels don’t have a satisfying conclusion. They’re left much more open-ended. [At first] I found it really disconcerting to be left hanging, to not know what I’m supposed to think about what just happened. But it’s actually fascinating that they’re not telling me what to think. Instead, I have to think about it. That’s much more like life.”
It didn’t take long for the Anglo world to borrow the popular cozy label and add their own spin, a.k.a. adding sex where there never was before. While the Japanese titles are rooted in ambiguity, sentimentality, lingering, and longing, the Western way gets straight to the point: the cafe owner is having an orgasm in the leaf-strewn alleyway. There is no catharsis without consummation for us. The alleyway sex scene is from the biggest cozy native to the Anglo world, The Pumpkin Spice Café by Laurie Gilmore, a pen name that nods to the TV show Gilmore Girls, which the book is essentially a fanfiction of. Making it a smutty romance allows the author to ride another genre’s tidal wave—according to the New York Times, print sales of romance books more than doubled in the past few years.
Cozy romances published since 2023 alone include The Spellshop, a cottagecore romantasy; Bookshops & Bonedust, a cozy PG fantasy; Done and Dusted for the horse girls; and five Laurie Gilmore offshoots, from The Cinnamon Bun Book Store to The Strawberry Patch Pancake House. They’ve all reached hundreds of thousands of readers, numbers the contemporary literary fiction debut novelist doesn’t dare dream of. In an interview with Cosmopolitan UK, Gilmore remarks on the success of The Pumpkin Spice Café: “The book, for whatever reason, seems to be capturing people. I got a really nice message this morning from someone saying they have ADHD and dyslexia, and it’s hard for them to get into a book, but they were able to get through mine.”
Allow me to suggest a reason. To read The Pumpkin Spice Café, 2024’s TikTok Shop Book of the Year, and other cozy lit is a near-equivalent experience to being on social media. Short and digestible chapters, pleasingly pretty faces, a steady drip of serotonin disguised as sincerity. But a humble paperback is not perceived as bad for humanity in the way that time wasted online is. While internet users install app-blocking extensions to prevent the embarrassing loop earlier described, reading remains culturally coded as virtuous, no matter how numbing and anti-intellectual the content. Cozy lit is indulgent but it is not shamed.
According to book scout Nina Reljić, that’s what sells. “The mainstream reader is gravitating toward an extremely sincere and honest embrace of our most typically shameful curiosities and desires,” she tells me. “In the literary world, there’s so much shame. It’s what keeps us all very cool. That is the antithesis of the commercial romance ethos, which is just like, ‘This is hot. This makes you feel good. This turns you on. And this makes me [the author] a lot of money.’”
Cozy lit’s Western ascendance seems less like cross-cultural exchange than smart and cynical co-optation. (Despite cats and blankets being coded as feminine, many of the popular cozies are written by men—a shrewd adaptation to what they think women want.) Gentleness becomes lifestyle product. It stays within a safe fantasy: to click on the next suggested Pinterest image evocative of Christian Girl Autumn instead of imagining something new entirely. I don’t feel that different when I finish a cozy than when I reach the end of my Instagram feed. The sense of consumption is the same. Cozy lit offers the image of a still life but basically feels like scrolling.
The post How “Cozy Lit” Became the Latest and Most Shameless Form of Digital Escapism first appeared on The Walrus.
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