Kiku: The Japanese Art of Good Listening

by Haru Yamada

Inspired by the Japanese concept of kiku—a more engaged, empathetic style of listening—sociolinguistics researcher and writer Haru Yamada offers a ground-breaking guide to more intentional and meaningful communication.

No other life form turns noise into sound, sound into language, then language into understanding quite the way we humans do when we listen. As a sociolinguist who grew up in different places with very different languages, Haru Yamada has always been fascinated with the way people navigate their day listening to language systems that code the world in such dramatically different ways. And it was as Haru was recovering in the ICU from an accident that had inflicted a permanent hearing disability when she rediscovered the extraordinary benefit found in the science of listening, the critical intelligence we need to learn and grow and get better.
 
Now, Haru Yamada offers a practical guide to more effective listening as a perceptive, creative exercise. We don’t just listen to what people say and don’t say, we reconstruct what someone else is saying and doing and meaning and feeling. Listening is a skill that requires our physical ear and brain power and the effort of our creative mind and social heart to remix what we hear from others and recreate it within ourselves. Kiku will allow you to harness the vital energy of listening to connect, sustain, and enhance the relationships you have with your friends, families, and professional teams.
 

Genres: Nonfiction

336 pages, Hardcover

Published October 7, 2025

About the author

Haru Yamada is a sociolinguistics researcher and writer with a PhD from Georgetown University. A distinction of her doctoral dissertation on conversational analysis of bankers’ meetings led to the publication of American and Japanese Business Discourse, where she introduced the idea of speaker- and listener-led conversations. Developing her concept of listener-led conversations in a publication with Oxford University Press, she published Different Games, Different Rules with a foreword by New York Times best-selling author Deborah Tannen. She regularly talks at academic conferences.

Haru’s life mission is to champion listening, in many ways enforced by a serious accident which left her nearly deaf and with a lifelong hearing disability. While hearing loss isn’t ideal in someone who spends their time listening, this personal challenge bolsters much of her everyday life and informs the book, making listening a thoughtful part of daily practice, drawing from skills she acquired from over seven international moves before attending university, and further moves as a working adult. She currently lives in London with her French partner, two multilingual, biracial, multicultural children in a hybrid working, bigenerational home.

Reviews

[Caitlin Holdcroft · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5*

I expected this book to be a little more philosophical than scientific. I suppose putting ‘art’ in the title is what suggests that.

- In my opinion, this book reads as a thesis; a lot of information packed together.
- It was more broad than I expected, covering verbal and non verbal communication broadly; the processes of speaking and listening; the science of sound, such as frequencies; social norms in conversation across ages and countries.
- It was quite simple at times, and I guess that’s what gave me University vibes (endless papers on things that are common sense and don’t need explaining).
- I also feel that the Fourteen Hearts topic didn’t come across convincingly. I felt like it was more of an unestablished hypothesis than a popular concept.

It was fine but I wouldn’t recommend.

[Torben Stegmüller · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately, I did not walk away from this book having learned the "Japanese Art of Listening with Fourteen Hearts". While offering some insight into how humans listen to each other and are having conversation, the author repeats herself often, sometimes delivers information that is simply untrue, and the whole concept of the book feels somewhat constructed.

What could have been a shorter book that simply offers some insight into human behavior, physiology and intercultural communication, in trying to come up with a pseudo-deep analysis of a supposedly "Japanese listening style" and having to fill 10 chapters with it, the topics sometimes feel forced and unrelated.

I did take away some interesting facts, but as a whole and the "life-changing book" this is claiming to be, I cannot recommend this book.

[Teresa Fales · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kiku is a fascinating look not only at the art of "Listening with 14 Hearts", but more broadly at the science of communication. I found some of the things that the author presents the scientific and cultural evidence for to be intuitive to listening, but there were definitely things that made me stop and think about how I listen, and how I can listen better. I received an advanced reader copy of Kiku through Publisher's Weekly's Grab a Galley giveaway, and I am happy to recommend this book to anyone who enjoys deep diving and discovering the science behind the everyday.

[K · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you are using a specific country to prove a point, please spell that country's name correctly.
Columbia is a university. The country is spelled Colombia. Perhaps less focus on listening and more focus on basic facts?

[Meera Hari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lot of facts packed together.Though helpful this textbook could have been easier to comprehend with a pinch of philosophy added to it .