I arrived on the 7:32 DART to Dún Laoghaire with a suitcase, a violin bow I couldn't play, and a pocket of tram tickets I couldn't bear to throw away. I rented a narrow room above a repair shop on Georges Street Lower and walked the East Pier most nights, naming the mooring rings and testing who I was against the wind. At the shuttered ferry terminal I photographed reflections—my Swedish father's shipyard hands, my Japanese mother's piano scales—caught in the glass beside the red lighthouse.
The town taught me a slower grammar: tea poured into a chipped blue thermos, morning swims at the Forty Foot, volunteer shifts at the National Maritime Museum on Haigh Terrace. I met Mairead at the dlr LexIcon, who filed me under Local after I drew my life on an Ordnance Survey map, and Patrick, a retired deckhand who mended my silence with ropework stories. Between storms and small mercies, I learned how to stay, how to listen, and how to belong to a harbor that asked nothing but patience.
Kenji Bergström is a Swedish-Japanese writer and photographer born in Gothenburg in 1985 and raised between Västra Frölunda and Yokohama. He studied acoustics at Chalmers University and worked in documentary subtitling before moving to Dublin Bay in 2012, where he apprenticed with a luthier in Monkstown and volunteered at the National Maritime Museum of Ireland. His essays have appeared in The Stinging Fly, Kyoto Journal, and The Dublin Review, noted for their quiet attention to shoreline geographies and the craft of repair.
Bergström is the recipient of a DLR Arts Bursary and was shortlisted for the Fish Short Memoir Prize. He is the author of the essay collections Harbor Hours (2019) and Small Weather (2021). When not writing, he photographs working harbors and restores secondhand cameras; he lives in Dún Laoghaire with a rescued whippet and a cabinet of sea-wet maps.
Filed under quiet coastal memoir.
The book keeps circling patience, attention, and chosen belonging, translating displacement into a harbor grammar. When Mairead "filed me under Local," the gesture reframes identity as practice, and the narrator's Swedish and Japanese inheritances feel like tides that can meet without cancelling each other. Even the pocketed tram tickets and the act of "naming the mooring rings" become a way to mark days without losing them. Gentle, resonant, and steady.
I love how this memoir rebuilds a harbor out of habits and weather. You can taste the salt and hear the gulls in the pauses between sentences. The town is not backdrop; it's a listening partner.
Those walks on the East Pier lit me up. Every named ring becomes a breadcrumb back to self, every gust across the black granite a dare to stay. I wanted to step straight onto those stones and match my breathing to the red lighthouse.
The Forty Foot passages could be a secular liturgy. Cold water, chipped blue thermos, the slow warmth returning to fingers. I felt the ritual hum.
And that shuttered terminal! The reflections in the glass carry a whole ancestry, Swedish shipyards and Japanese piano scales braided with Irish light. The moment lands with such grace that I had to stop and reread, smiling.
This is exactly the kind of place-first writing that makes me kinder and slower. It trusts patience, and in return it gives back belonging. Five stars, happily.
The narrator arrives guarded, and the portrait that follows feels composed from quiet gestures rather than confessions. Mairead registers as a librarian with a lightly ironic warmth, while Patrick's patience and rope stories become a surrogate grammar for trust. Dialogue is spare, eye contact and shared tea do more of the work, and that restraint pays off when belonging finally clicks. I closed the book thinking of how acts of attention can be a kind of conversation.
The structure settles into linked vignettes anchored to place: East Pier walks, the LexIcon desk, the museum shifts. The sentences are salt-clean and careful, often turning on small, tactile details like thermos chips and tram tickets. At times the recurrence of the mooring rings feels over-signaled, and the violin bow metaphor strains. But the photographs at the shuttered terminal gleam, and the ropework anecdotes tie scenes together neatly. A gentle book whose pacing sometimes eddies before finding the current again.
A quiet, tidal memoir that moves like the 7:32 DART into Dún Laoghaire, with East Pier nights and Forty Foot mornings unfolding in patient, satisfying laps.
