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Three Episodes Left in 2026

With only three episodes remaining, hosts Jane Su and Horii Mika reflect on a year that passed in a flash. "It's been a 2026 that flew by," both agree. Mika notes that she has answered more than 3,000 listener questions in the show's advice segment, then adds quietly, "I just kept stacking them up, one day at a time."

Horii Mika's Christmas Concert (December 19, Tokyo International Forum Hall A)

Mika announces that on Saturday, December 19, from 2:30 p.m., she will host "Christmas Special Classics" at Tokyo International Forum Hall A. Reuniting with Theater Orchestra Tokyo—her collaborators from a previous Budokan concert—the program centers on Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker and Beethoven's Ninth, performed by a full lineup of professional soprano, tenor, mezzo-soprano, and baritone soloists. Mika herself will serve as narrator and emcee. Tokyo International Forum sits right next to Tokyo Station, and Hall A holds approximately 5,000 people.

Su offers her own endorsement: "Going to see The Nutcracker ballet or a Christmas concert at this time of year is the one thing that makes the whole year settle into place." It gives her, she says, "the feeling of being a well-bred child." She recommends that parents who can afford it take their kids to one Christmas concert a year—it will be etched into the family's memory.

Su's Biggest Worry: The New Year's Eve Pro-Wrestling Clash

Su's number-one concern for 2026 is December 31. For years, attending All Japan Pro Wrestling's Ryogoku show on New Year's Eve has been her established way of closing out the year. This time, however, NOAH has announced a large-scale event in the Yokohama area on the same day at essentially the same time—All Japan at Ryogoku from 2 p.m., NOAH in Yokohama from 3 p.m.—with both main events guaranteed to be the highlight of their respective cards.

Su is a "hako-oshi" (箱推し) fan of both promotions, meaning she supports each organization as a whole rather than individual wrestlers. Whichever show she attends, she is convinced she will spend December 32 in tears over the one she missed. She subscribes to both streaming services—NOAH on Wrestle Universe, All Japan on ZennichiTV—but jokes that "the worst possible ending would be going to one venue and watching the other on my phone over Wi-Fi."

She has already warned her partner that the entire New Year's period is "all pro wrestling." When Mika suggests sending the partner to NOAH while Su goes to All Japan, Su shakes her head: that solves nothing. She calls it "the final judgment handed down to me by the pro-wrestling world in 2026," then laughs at herself for suffering so intensely over a situation in which she has bought no tickets and received no invitations. "I am agonizing entirely on my own," she admits.

Listener Letters: "Loves I Can't Put into Words"—Cicadas, and White Round Smooth Things

The listener segment opens with a letter from "Yukoru," age 50. Her unexplainable love is cicadas. As a child she would join store-bought bug nets to morning glory stakes to extend her reach and fill entire bug cages. As an adult she still cannot stop herself from grabbing any cicada within arm's length—this past summer included. A younger friend recoiled in horror; peers her own age have christened her "semi-babaa." She closes with a decisive "I have zero interest in any other insect," which Su greets with a laugh: "That's total dedication—she's one-track all the way."

Next comes a letter from the listener who signs off as "My Hobby Is Napping, My Favorite Words Are Second Sleep," age 55. While driving along a river she spotted large, perfectly white, river-polished boulders scattered along the bank and became "abnormally excited." A friend's remark—"you are seriously worked up right now"—was the first time she realized it. Looking back, the pattern had always been there: Yukimi Daifuku ice cream, mochi swelling to bursting on a stove, chubby baby hands, the soft belly of a slightly pudgy man, the kind of pudding you can pop with a pin. "So that's why I like slightly chubby guys"—a punchline that lands with precision.

Su shares her own version: she cannot explain her attachment to squeezes (low-rebound foam toys) or the sensation of touching water. Her personal weakness, she reveals, is the Tempur pillow—specifically "the feeling of pressing it down and watching it slowly come back."

Picture Books and the Origins of Emotion

The conversation opens into a larger question: where do our loves come from? Mika says that looking at the cover of the picture book Gurunpa gives her a strange sensation, as if something is fitting into her mouth. "As though I used to bite the book, or something was lodging itself inside it. I still can't explain it."

Su says she still keeps Yanase Takashi's Yasashii Raion (優しいライオン)—the very copy she owned as a child, which she brought into her marriage—a story about a dog that raises a lion cub until police arrive with guns when the lion grows up. She had blacked out every illustration of the police officer with a dark marker. "I only noticed when I showed it to my kid," she says with a laugh, reflecting that her sense of justice and instinct to protect had been fierce from an early age.

Both agree: picture books were the place where people first learned what emotions feel like. The cicada obsession, the pull toward white round smoothness—all of it may trace back to some moment in early childhood. The episode continues.