‘How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart’: Welcome sustenance for the Japan memoir genre

The heartbreaks we carry throughout our lives aren’t always born from first loves or messy divorces. Sometimes they are the result of quiet relationships, ones that develop inconspicuously and dissolve in a similar manner.

Florentyna Leow’s “How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart” is both a love letter to Japan’s historical capital and a love story about friendship and its complicated emotional impact. Leow’s debut collection of essays chronicles two breakups: her tumultuous feelings for Kyoto, developed while based there for two years as a travel assistant and sometimes tour guide, and her equally fraught relationship with an unnamed platonic roommate and colleague who moves away and abruptly ends their friendship.