How “Cozy Lit” Became the Latest and Most Shameless Form of Digital Escapism

Illustration by Julieta Caballero

This story was originally published on thewalrus.ca

By Greta Rainbow

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