The Maiden Within Me

I was stunned when a junior colleague at a company asked, "Could you bake a wedding cake for us?" They wanted to surprise their friends at an informal celebration by having a DVD with a message video pop out when they cut the cake.

He probably didn't know this, but while I can handle roast beef, cakes are my Achilles' heel. Sure, I enjoy cooking, but I just eyeball measurements and wing it. Sweets? That requires meticulously following measuring cups and recipe steps—something I've barely done. And a wedding cake? I'd have no clue about the decoration. My artistic skills are so bad, even a dog I draw ends up looking like a car. Could I even manage to hide a DVD inside the sponge? But it is a celebration, after all. Refusing would be rude, so I kinda just went with the flow and agreed.

And then, once I actually started... well, this is fun! What kind of cake should I make? Round? Square? Strawberries? Melon? I definitely want silver sprinkles, right? Blah blah. Sketching out the images in my head, I found myself playing around so much I wondered, where on earth did this boozy old man find such a cute hobby?

My book How to Create Concepts largely follows the framework of my previous work, The Idea Textbook, but it also includes several new approaches. One such attempt was explaining the process of circular thinking—a methodology for creating concepts (ideas)—using the metaphor of "little people" inside the body.

These "little people" are a collective of intuitions like "That target audience would probably say this" or "This person would likely react like that." You cultivate various "little people" inside your body—like a high school girl, a salaryman, an elderly person, and so on. These little people are essentially half-objective, half-subjective entities, formed by the integration of "eyes" gained from various materials and my own "physical reactions (sensuality)."

Especially when brainstorming concepts (ideas), I must actually create prototypes and evaluate them vividly. That's when the "little people's true feelings" prove immensely useful. Through dialogue with these "little people," my thinking progresses neither toward my own arbitrary judgments nor toward the shallow conclusions suggested by numerical data.

And to maintain this "world of the little people," I must experience as many values as possible and keep the freshness of high school girls, salarymen, and the elderly alive. "Experiencing values" isn't anything complicated—it's simply about having friends from completely different generations and backgrounds, or taking on small challenges like my "cake baking."

What I need to reflect on is that my "challenges" always revolve around food. Just the other day, I spotted rhubarb and, out of character, made jam. It's probably influenced by essays I read as a child by Kei Morimura. When enveloped by the aroma wafting from the jam-making pot, I feel like I'm living a very wholesome life. It transports me to the world of Western stories, like "Little House on the Prairie." Honestly, rhubarb itself is just monotonously sour—"What's so delicious about it?"—and frankly, given the despairingly high amount of sugar required for jam (roughly half the weight of the fruit; for 1kg of apples, that's 500g of sugar!), it's hard to call it "virtuous" at all. Still, I inevitably end up enjoying it with yogurt for breakfast (something I usually skip due to hangovers).

The cold grows deeper each day. It's the season when pickles taste their best, so next time I'll write about that theme from Nagano.

Enjoy!