Chat #32 - Callie Kazumi
"If you write because you love it, the wheel will always be stopped"
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Callie Kazumi is a British-Japanese writer who started work on her first book after being gifted Stephen King’s On Writing by her father. She lives in London with her husband, their Bichon Frisé, Betsy, and cat, Weeman.
Follow Callie on Instagram: @callieuntitled
23/06/2026, 19:31 - Finbarre:
Hi, it’s Finbarre and welcome to Tarot DMs. Today I’m joined by Callie Kazumi, a British-Japanese author of the psychological thrillers Cuckoo and Greedy.
Callie writes sharp, unsettling stories about secrets and dark appetites.
She is here for three cards, so let us see what this Madame of the Macabre reveals.
23/06/2026, 19:33 - Callie Kazumi:
Excited to be here. Let’s go.
23/06/2026, 19:35 - Finbarre:
You sound far, far too active on what could potentially be one of the hottest days of the year, if not one of our recorded temperatures. My cat at the moment is sprawled out in that way that only cats can. I think instead of being this feline embodiment of svelte elegance, it is just a ginger profusion of legs. And in fact, it seems to have now more legs than it had before. And it’s splayed out in every compass direction. Do you have any pets?
23/06/2026, 19:36 - Finbarre:
23/06/2026, 19:36 - Callie Kazumi:
I’m absolutely not active. I really, really struggle in the heat, actually. I don’t think
I’ve slept or eaten in days. It’s not great. I do have pets. I have a kitten who’s four months old called Weeman, my husband’s Scottish. And we kept saying Weeman’s coming soon and it stuck.
He’s currently splooted very similarly to your cat. And we have a Bichon Frisé called Betsy, who is sitting on the sofa staring at me and panting, wondering why she’s not been getting her afternoon walks and doesn’t understand that it’s because it’s so blooming hot. You can even see her panting in the picture I’ll send. It’s such a shame. We’re just all struggling.
23/06/2026, 19:37 - Callie Kazumi:
23/06/2026, 19:37 - Callie Kazumi:
23/06/2026, 19:38 - Finbarre:
“Splooted” is a word that’s now been stolen. Thank you for that. I will be putting that to good use. And the little teeny tiny dog you’ve got there, it doesn’t look real. Did this dog just appear as if by magic one day? It is definitely a regular dog, right?
23/06/2026, 19:38 - Finbarre: TOO CUTE TO EXIST
23/06/2026, 19:39 - Callie Kazumi:
Yeah, she looks like a tiny little lamb. She’s so sweet. She’s so cute. But she is very much real. Luckily for me.
23/06/2026, 19:40 - Finbarre:
Every time you see a dog like that in a film, they always turn out to be some kind of ravening hellbeast. So I’ve got a question about the tarot. How experienced are you with the cards? Is it something that you picked up as a teenager? Is it a recent discovery? Or are you coming into this cold?
23/06/2026, 19:43 - Callie Kazumi:
With tarot, basically, during COVID in 2020, when everyone else was becoming very obsessed with baking banana bread, I fell down a hole and got super interested in paganism.
It’s very on brand for me. Honestly, I feel like if you had approached me to enter a cult in 2020, I would have fallen hook, line and sinker.
I was reading about paganism and then it expanded from there and discovered tarot. I got a card set and I did a couple of the past, present, future pulls, but that was pretty much it.
I would not say I’m experienced, but I probably have a better understanding than the average person who doesn’t own a set of tarot cards, I guess I could say.
23/06/2026, 19:45 - Finbarre: I wasn’t baking banana bread... to keep sane. I listened to every song by the Cure, ranked each one individually and gave myself the quest to find out which was their best album through SCIENCE. Turns out it is The Head On The Door and I have the data.
23/06/2026, 19:45 - Finbarre: Anyway.
23/06/2026, 19:45 - Finbarre: Your first card.
23/06/2026, 19:46 - Finbarre: Now, as I have been galavanting about at festivals to record Season Two of the Tarot Interviews podcast, yours is the first Tarot DMs chat I have done this month so the theme card was set today in honour of this ungodly heatwave.
23/06/2026, 19:47 - Finbarre: You get...
23/06/2026, 19:47 - Finbarre:
23/06/2026, 19:47 - Callie Kazumi: Fucking hell do I get the sun
23/06/2026, 19:47 - Finbarre: You get more.
23/06/2026, 19:47 - Callie Kazumi: Can’t believe you pulled that today of all days 😂😂😂😂
23/06/2026, 19:50 - Finbarre:
Okay Callie your first tarot question so let’s be frank… your books are twisted and your voice when I’ve just spoken to you there has a humor and an energy to it.
Well an energy if you weren’t reclining like some Victorian lady upon a chaise longue or however it is we’re spending this heat.
Where does the joy that I heard fit into your dark fiction?
23/06/2026, 19:53 - Callie Kazumi:
Do you know what? I think I am a bit of a Chandler Bing, if you have watched Friends. I’ve always used humour as kind of a fallback in everything, really. I think my sense of humour is very dry, sarcastic, quite sardonic. And it’s something that it’s just very like a part of me. I don’t even really think about it or realise that I’m doing it. But if I feel uncomfortable or there is something really terrible going on, I’m not very in touch with my emotions.
So I guess I just fall to humour as an easy way to process things and get through things. I find as well that humour is something that just connects everyone. And if you share a sense of humour, then that’s like such an important thing for kind of building relationships and using as a foundation for friendships on. And I think that comes across in my writing. I think that greedy, especially.
If you had to put my personality into a book, it’s 100% greedy. I think it’s very dryly funny and there is humour there. And some people might miss that. But then I think people that know me and have that same kind of really dark, dry sense of humour and the cynicism will see it dripping through so many of the ridiculous scenes in that book.
So I guess that’s the light. I just always think humour is the most light of all emotions and kind of... Is humour an emotion? I don’t know. But yeah, sorry, my head’s a bit foggy, to be honest. I’m so blooming hot. I can’t believe you pulled the sun either. I can’t believe that. That’s absolutely mad.
23/06/2026, 19:56 - Finbarre: I’m curious, do you find yourself giggling as you are writing away or is it more of an abstract/cerebral experience?
23/06/2026, 19:57 - Callie Kazumi:
No, I definitely laugh when I’m writing sometimes, especially the lambshank scene in Greedy. I was laughing. I just thought it was so ridiculous. The whole thing was silly. It had started off being written as a sex scene and then just developed something much, much weirder. And I just sat laughing away at my laptop.
23/06/2026, 19:59 - Finbarre:
I can just picture you emerging from a writing room with some kind of devilish, bizarre grin on your face and people going “What have you done???”
Right, we’re on to the second card.
Now, this is a Wild card.
This is one I’m going to pluck from the deck whenever you tell me.
So when you hear this message, I will be shuffling away.
When you say stop or write stop, I’ll pop whatever card we get on the cushion just by the little octopus who’s helping me out today.
23/06/2026, 20:00 - Finbarre:
23/06/2026, 20:00 - Callie Kazumi: Stop!
23/06/2026, 20:00 - Finbarre: *stops*
23/06/2026, 20:01 - Finbarre:
23/06/2026, 20:01 - Finbarre: What do you reckon it’ll be?
23/06/2026, 20:03 - Callie Kazumi: Pentacles
23/06/2026, 20:04 - Finbarre: Let’s find out...
23/06/2026, 20:04 - Finbarre:
23/06/2026, 20:05 - Finbarre: Looks like your Covid lockdown was your superhero origin story. Well done!
23/06/2026, 20:05 - Callie Kazumi: That’s mad
23/06/2026, 20:06 - Finbarre:
I have to say that for me, this isn’t a carf that comes up often. It’s one of holding on tightly.
So, of course, we have here a figure who is clutching a pentacle to their chest. It’s mine. I was going to put on a Golum voice, but I think I hopefully have spared you that.
Of course, he’s got one on the head and there’s a couple between the feet as well. So it’s about security, but also possessiveness and a fear of loss.
23/06/2026, 20:08 - Finbarre:
I think if the card was asking something, it would be, what am I protecting and is it still worth protecting?
So for the Four of Pentacles, I’ll ask you, as you’ve written about reclaiming identity and your name, has that changed your idea of creative ownership?
23/06/2026, 20:08 - Callie Kazumi: In what sense?
23/06/2026, 20:10 - Finbarre:
I was thinking of the way that you’ve previously written about reclaiming Kazumi, if this would change the parts of your identity or experience that belong in the work.
23/06/2026, 20:16 - Callie Kazumi:
I think that the reason that I write so much about kind of identity on my sub stack is because I think there’s so much to explore there.
And I’m not 100% sure where I stand on my views with these types of things.
I wrote a blog post. You might have seen it just about.
I didn’t even feel that I had the right to use the name Kazumi, even though it’s my passport.
And I think a lot of this kind of insecurity comes from being second gen immigrant, but also I’m very white passing.
And I think that it definitely has 100%. It’s given me what I feel is a foundation to be able to write books set in Japan.
Greedy is set in Japan, obviously, and Hazeline is half white, half Japanese.
And my third book, which is currently with my agent, is also set in Japan.
And I think there would have been a sort of fear had I written under my married name that people would assume I didn’t have the right to tell these stories.
I think it’s quite an interesting thing because there is always this question of whose stories do we have the right to be telling in fiction, especially when we’re making things up, essentially.
The whole point of fiction is to envision a different life and create a new world.
But then when you’re speaking about marginalized voices or people who have faced discrimination and you’re not someone who has experienced that, then you’re writing from a place of privilege where you’re having the opportunity to get paid to imagine other people suffering.
And it’s an interesting kind of concept to delve into because there needs to be more diversity in the books that we’re reading.
We need to be seeing more books where the main character is a character of color or LGBTQ.
And obviously we’re getting much better, but it’s still a minority.
And I think that that responsibility lies with the publishing houses to be buying more because I don’t believe that there are not the writers out there able to speak their stories and write characters from their own lived experiences.
On the other side of the spectrum, I’ve written a book about cannibals and I’m not a cannibal. So I think it’s an interesting thing.
What right does our identity give us to be able to tell a certain story?
My next book, my third one, I’m out of contract, so it’s not been bought by anyone just yet. And as I said, it’s with my agent.
That is different from Greedy in that the characters are Japanese, but completely Japanese.
I found it very difficult to write because the book is about work culture and workplace toxicity, which is why I want to set it in Japan, because they have such an extreme work culture that it’s very easy to satirize in a way that people in the West will understand, but still be authentic and realistic.
There’s a lot of things that happen in particularly places like Tokyo that couldn’t happen in the UK because of our workplace laws and unions and things like that.
But at the same time, I was very conscious of writing something which might paint a negative portrayal of a country that I haven’t lived or grown up in.
So it’s difficult.
There’s always research that can be done. I did do the research that went into this book was so extensive. Obviously, we’ve been out there a few times. I’ve met with so many people who have had the opportunity to work there and interview them. Even that, I felt was pushing myself to a place that potentially wasn’t my place to be speaking.
I just hope that the people that do read the book and who have worked in Japan, particularly in a toxic environment, and experience the things that some of my characters have experienced with struggles relating to their culture of tradition and conformity.
I hope that those people will read it and feel that I brought justice to it, to their experience. I feel like having written from my name, I did put a lot of myself in the book as well.
I’ve always wanted to live in Japan.
I think that realistically, being neurodivergent and being unable to conform the minority of the time, I think I would find it very difficult. So a lot of that went into the characters’ background.
23/06/2026, 20:17 - Callie Kazumi:
Cat had moved to cooler pastures. Dog is still sulking but no longer panting.
23/06/2026, 20:17 - Callie Kazumi:
23/06/2026, 20:19 - Finbarre: Now I have cushion AND floorboard envy. Gorgeous.
23/06/2026, 20:22 - Finbarre:
Again, distracted by your gorgeous photos.
On a more serious note, I’m touched that you’re able to share that uncertainty, that journey that you’ve taken.
And that leads us to your third card.
This one was chosen by a band from the US, from Brooklyn, called The Dream Eaters.
Their videos have to be seen to be believed.
If you haven’t heard of them and seen their work, I get the feeling you might enjoy it and they’ve gifted you the third card. It’s this one.
23/06/2026, 20:23 - Finbarre:
23/06/2026, 20:23 - Callie Kazumi: Great pick
23/06/2026, 20:25 - Finbarre:
So last question for you, Callie. I imagine being a writer is like being in the centre of a roulette wheel with often uncertainty spinning around you. Has there been a point in your writing life where that wheel has stopped and things suddenly made more sense?
23/06/2026, 20:27 - Finbarre:
Mine has decided that the day is subpar
23/06/2026, 20:31 - Callie Kazumi:
I think it was when I was writing Greedy, to be honest. I think I’d written lots of books before Cuckoo and they were all terrible. And it’s one of those things where I was always writing for myself and I just love to write and I have to be writing all the time. And Cuckoo was the first book that I wrote, which I felt was sellable and really quite decent. But I didn’t feel like it was very me just writing because I love to write and there had been no consideration going into it about me and my brand identity and all these kind of business things that you have to think about when you are an author. And obviously it got bought and it was a two book contract. So I had to try and write something similar for the second book and I just couldn’t. I found it really difficult. I did. Well, I mean, I could because I did. And I wrote a whole new commercial psychological thriller about a missing girl in London. But all the time in the back of my head, I had this strange idea about a man who falls into a job working as a private chef for a cannibal in Japan. And it was all I thought and I had this real chip on my shoulder where I thought I can’t write this because this isn’t what they want.
This isn’t what they’ve paid for. And this isn’t what they publish. I have to give them something similar to Cuckoo.
So I wrote that book and sent it off to them and then very, very, very quickly started writing Greedy and it fell out of my hands onto the keyboard within like a month. I think it was written because I had just been festering and thinking about this and obsessing over the characters internally for months and months.
So I wrote it and I had the most fun and I just felt like this was exactly what I wanted to be doing. And I sent it to my agent and I said, look, I know they probably won’t buy this.
She was dubious as well. She was like “Cannibals? Tricky sell” But at the end of the day, she really enjoyed it.
I think that was the first moment where I was like, oh, my God, she really enjoys this. It felt like I was getting validation because for some reason, Greedy just felt more like me.
I sent the book. I sent them both. And very luckily for me, my editor also loved Greedy.
I think that was a moment where I realized that maybe my I had found my I felt like I had found my voice and my brand as an author and a writer.
I knew where I fit in. And it’s this kind of it’s not literary, but I don’t think it’s super commercially there. I think it’s kind of a book club level. I have a lot of I have a lot to say.
I’ve got a lot of opinions. I’m quite political, even though I don’t talk about it online. Being able to write these kind of really strange, weird, dark, funny books about characters who struggle with things that I find so deeply fascinating psychologically and culturally. It’s just such a gift. And I just thought, bloody hell, I can’t believe they bought this and they liked it.
That’s so lucky. I’m so privileged to have that and to be able to write something that I actually truly love writing.
So, yeah, that was probably the moment that I thought, wow, I could actually do something here and not have to kind of concede or commercialize myself to please the mass public.
But then that said, you know, as I said, I’m out of contract now. So who knows what will happen? Maybe this is where the wheel picks up again.
I think every every author feels like this when they’re out of contract and they’re waiting to see if their contract will be renewed or or what will happen.
Yeah, it’s I think being an author is always you’re always spinning.
Really, you’re always nervous. Someone’s not going to like it or you’re going to write something that’s going to end up being a waste of time because no one’s going to want it.
I think that the only way to get past that is to just write because you really love it, not because you want to make money, not because you want to be known or famous or all these things.
I think just if you just write because you love it and the wheel will always be stopped and steady and you will feel secure in yourself and your work.
23/06/2026, 20:37 - Finbarre: PTT-20260623-WA0031.opus (file attached)
23/06/2026, 20:48 - Callie Kazumi: Thank you so much for having me!! Seven of cups came to mind for some reason!
23/06/2026, 20:50 - Callie Kazumi:
23/06/2026, 20:51 - Finbarre:
What a wonderful energy to finish on, Callie.
From where I am in Beeston, I’m going to reach across the country and grant you the power of having the hands of fate.
Now here, you can place your thumb on the scale or pull from the cards of destiny or however you want to influence the next person that I speak to in terms of what card they get.
And I’d like you to choose one.
So are you going to bestow upon them something nice and easy? Is it going to be a card that asks difficult questions?
The power is yours.
23/06/2026, 20:54 - Callie Kazumi: Thank you!!
23/06/2026, 20:57 - Finbarre:
Kelly, that is a gorgeous depiction of, frankly, one of the trippiest cards in the tarot.
Please give my love to Weeman and Betsy.
And thank you so much for joining me on Tarot DMs.
23/06/2026, 20:58 - Finbarre:
You can find Callie’s books, Cuckoo and Greedy, wherever you buy your fabulous literature, and find out more at calliekazumi.com
Don’t forget that Series 2 of the Tarot Interviews podcast is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Hear which cards performers and festival-goers pulled, and some of them were dressed in battle armour. See you there!