Dear friends,

Long time no see! How have you been?
I’ve been busy, with everything. I guess.
Today I decided to take a break to rearrange my thoughts and try to rest a little. I’m in separation with Mr Saito again. It’s a good decision for both of us and sometimes we need a break from love to focus on life. The balance is not always that easy to keep, I assume. I did my best, though.

I’m turning 35 and I start to memorize my golden age – my Seishun – my La Belle Époque.

I’ve been thinking about La Belle Époque because the talk between Emily and Gabriel still haunts me. The air in Paris after the rain is thick but it always has a scent of sadness mix with rebel. Even today, Paris still hums with a lingering whisper of something lost, something once exquisitely lived. It’s a bittersweet melancholy that clings to the Haussmannian facades and the wrought-iron balconies, a silent testament to a time when the city was truly the epicenter of the world’s defiant joy: La Belle Époque.

This concept La Belle Époque – The Beautiful Era – roughly spanning from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. It was a period of unprecedented peace, prosperity, and artistic flourishing in France. A time when can-can dancers at the Moulin Rouge kicked their impossibly high legs in a whirlwind of lace and laughter, when Impressionist painters captured fleeting light on canvas, and when technological marvels like the automobile and cinema promised an endless horizon of progress. Life, for many, was a dazzling spectacle, a perpetual garden party of innovation and decadence

Then we all know about Carpe Diem – another concept of sadness, and how we should enjoy every single moment as if it is our last. It was, in essence, a prolonged, collective act of living. Carpe Diem is a more hedonistic, almost desperate embrace of every pleasure the present could offer, a very “Come what may” recognition. The uncertainty of future conflict, the memory of past suffering was momentarily forgotten or willfully ignored in a café conversations on a random afternoon by the river, extravagant and even ridiculous fashion, and a relentless pursuit of beauty and novelty. Parisians lived as if tomorrow would never come, or perhaps, as if it should be celebrated into submission.

Like a perfectly ripe fruit, La Belle Époque was destined to fall. The shadows of trench warfare and global conflict were gathering even as the champagne flowed. Well then, we do have our own champagne problems. The very brilliance of the era casts a long, sad shadow forward, reminding us of its tragic end. This is where the Japanese concept of Seishun (青春) – “blue spring” or the “bloom of youth” – offers a poignant parallel. This concept of Seishun (青春) exists and it has the same meaning as La Belle Époque or Carpe Diem.

Seishun in Japanese culture mostly refers to the vibrant fleeting period of youth, marked by intense emotions, dreams, and discoveries. In our Seishun, we have our hatsukoi, our first kiss, first date and so many many beautiful short moments. It’s a time of boundless energy and opportunity, but also inherently transient. There’s an understanding that this “blue spring”, or like I prefer to call it Ao haru ride – The blue spring ride, will inevitably pass, and with it a certain innocence and possibility. We are often urged to live our Seishun to the fullest, precisely because it is so ephemeral. It’s a call to action wrapped in the melancholy of inevitability.

La Belle Époque is French’s Seishun. A collective youthfulness and vigor that seems imbued with a tragic sad grace. Paintings of Renoir or Monet, the very architecture of Paris from that period, all whisper of this fleeting bloom. They capture a beauty that was intensely lived, yet always destined to fade.

To be honest, I love Emily Cooper. Consider she has been navigating her own modern Seishun in Paris. Her American spirit, her relentless pursuit of a picture-perfect moment, and her wide-eyed wonder at Parisian life, echo that earlier era’s embrace of novelty. She is in her own way, trying to profiter de l’instant présent, to absorb every vibrant detail. The show often hints at a deeper, unstated longing. Emily’s struggle to truly connect, to penetrate beyond the façade, mirrors a modern yearning for the kind of effortless joie de vivre that La Belle Époque once promised.

And there’s a flicker of that earlier Carpe Diem – the strong desire to document and savor the beauty. The ghost of La Belle Époque, the echo of that magnificent Seishun, reminds us that true seizing of the day isn’t just about capturing it; it’s about losing oneself in it so completely that its passing leaves an indelible, yet bittersweet mark.