The Spreadsheet of Desire

By Andy — 2026-08-22 — Literary News

A plane ticket booked months early. A text sent at exactly 11:02 AM to avoid suspicion.

You understand the calculation. The person boarding a flight to New York in Momo Yamaguchi's Hello, Limerence is not simply traveling—she's managing the appearance of indifference while trapped in the kind of mathematical obsession that only first infatuation permits. The novel, Yamaguchi's debut, opens with Mika running through airport logic like a woman conducting her own trial: if the airlines know the weight limit, do they not care? Are we all about to plummet?

The mechanics matter because they mirror what follows.

Yamaguchi was born in Tokyo, educated in the US, and now lives and works in London. She's written something that treats longing with the precision of an engineer, not a romantic. Mika doesn't just miss Tai—she color-codes their text conversation into a spreadsheet. She measures response times. She controls the frequency and tone of their exchanges with the deliberation of someone handling something that might shatter if held too tight. The mikan emoji at the end of his text ("text me when you get there!") becomes nodule of meaning she will examine for hours like a geologist studying samples.

This is what limerence looks like at 24: not poetry, but surveillance.

The excerpt published by Literary Hub gives you the rhythm of it. A woman with spreadsheets and anxious logic. A woman who says "I am a Madonna, not a whore" to herself whilst deleting and rewriting a three-word text message. The humiliation is not incidental to the desire—it's the texture of it. When she reaches New York, she'll have 6,700 miles between them. More than enough distance to feed on the scraps. The morsels, as she calls them.

The Bookseller described the book as an exploration of sex, sexuality, love and power, and in this fragment you see the arithmetic working: how much of her own need can she conceal? How much can she infer from a single emoji? The spreadsheet is her religion. The data her prayer.

At 199 pages, the novel is brimming with sexually frustrated and self-deprecating internal dialogue, devourable in a single sitting. That tells you something about the pacing. There's no breathing room. Just the relentless cataloguing of what it feels like to turn 25 with nothing but a soul-crushing office job and an imaginary relationship. The novel follows Mika through Tokyo, through summer, through the invention of meaning in the smallest gestures.

What makes Yamaguchi's voice stick is that she doesn't shy from the ugliness of it. The obsession isn't tragic or noble. It's petty and devouring and hilarious and sad all at once. She's reading their texts every night from the beginning. She's memorizing every exchange. She's cling to the morsels. And she knows, somewhere in there, that the person she's obsessing over barely registers her existence at all.

The spreadsheet isn't a joke. It's the only honest thing she has.