Never Edited

Action figures crowded every surface. Sneakers in colors that shouldn’t exist. SpongeBob everywhere. I saw Yasumasa Yonehara’s apartment on The Selby and I wanted everything he had.

There are spaces that trigger the standard kind of envy—the light, the room, the money. But sometimes you see how someone actually lives, and it’s unedited, unjustified, complete in itself, and that hits different. You realize you’ve been compromising your whole life without even noticing it. That’s when envy becomes something sharper.

Yonehara is a photographer based in Tokyo, known for portraits of girls that have real tenderness despite how exposed they are. But his apartment doesn’t perform anything. It’s just what he loves. Action figures, sneakers in shades of neon that don’t exist in nature, SpongeBob dolls, accumulated with the clarity of someone who knows exactly what matters. His space is maybe two hundred square feet. One of those Tokyo apartments where you’re turning sideways past furniture constantly. And every inch of it is uncompromised.

Most people spend their whole lives quietly hating their own taste, editing themselves smaller to fit into spaces that were built for normal people. He just lived. The apartment is cramped, crowded, objectively a disaster by any standard measure. But looking at it, I understand something: he never had to choose between being himself and having a nice life. He just kept it all.

I’m booking my flight to his desk.