Author: Kathryn

Reader of books and player of games. College professor and pokémon trainer. Writes about Japanese fiction, media, gender, and society. In love with monsters and magic. https://digitalfantasydiary.com/

Kamimachi

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Machiko Kyō’s Kamimachi (かみまち) was serialized from June 2019 to December 2022 and published as a two-volume graphic novel in August 2023. The story follows four homeless teenage girls who find themselves at a privately run youth shelter called Kami No Ie (“Family of God”) in the Tokyo suburbs.

Although he initially seems kind and welcoming, the middle-aged man who runs this shelter is a sexual predator, and he has assaulted and murdered one of his young charges prior to the beginning of the story. The ghost of this young woman, in the form of a Christian angel, helps the girls find the courage to escape the Kami No Ie shelter.

Each of the four main characters in Kamimachi has become homeless after escaping a toxic home environment.

Uka is the only child of a single mother who projects her loneliness and frustrated ambitions onto her daughter. The story begins as Uka leaves home and seeks shelter by means of a roomshare app. After a number of awkward situations, Uka comes to the attention of a group of men who use the app to recruit sex workers. These men force Uka into a situation in which she’s expected to trade a night at a short-term rental space for sex. She breaks out of the apartment and wanders the streets of Tokyo before finding herself at the Kami No Ie shelter.

Uka’s closest friend at the shelter, Nagisa, has been sexually abused by her stepfather for years. She finally flees from home after her mother witnesses one of these assaults and turns away in disgust.

Arisa was raised as a television idol by a single mother. After her mother’s sudden death in an accident, Arisa is given to the care of a talent manager who steals her inheritance and financial assets, leaving her destitute.

Yō is one of five siblings. She’s so neglected by her family and bullied by her brothers that she finds it preferable to sleep in subway stations. Eventually she stops returning home altogether.  

For each of these young women, Tokyo becomes a wilderness whose anonymous open spaces serve as a refuge from the enclosed interiors where they’re coerced into enduring abuse. Kyō draws indoor scenes using small panels with blank backgrounds, and these scenes often feature close-ups of the characters’ faces in moments of distress. Meanwhile, Kyō depicts outdoor scenes with large panels that frame the characters with trees and buildings. The expansive outdoor settings often serve as the stage for small moments of kindness and emotional clarity.

In Chapter Three, for example, Uka flees into the night after an attempted sexual assault at a roomshare apartment. After her escape, she wanders through the rain with nothing but the clothes on her back. Out of context, the rainy cityscape may seem bleak, but the large panels filled are a visual relief after the oppressively small and claustrophobic panels that depict the apartment.

One of the anonymous figures passing in the rain, whom the reader later learns is Yō, stops beside Uka to give her an umbrella. Page 71 opens with a close-up of Yō’s extended hand before spreading into an open panel in which Uka and Yō stand at the center of a composition framed by misty buildings and puddles on the concrete. The two small figures reaching out to one another are enclosed in a soft curtain of rain, and the sense of relief at being a part of a larger world is palpable.  

Chapter Seven contains a similar scene in which the open sky and background cityscape suggest freedom from the violence that occurs behind closed doors. Nagisa, who’d encountered Uka in a roomshare arrangement, takes Uka’s discarded uniform and attends school in her place. One of Uka’s former classmates approaches Nagisa, offers to share her lunch, and asks that Nagisa talk with her on the roof. Nagisa initially tries to be normal, showing the girl photos of her mother and stepfather’s new infant daughter.

During this scene, the panels become progressively smaller until Nagisa finally admits the truth about having left her family. The shift to a full-page panel depicting the city’s jumble of buildings spreading under the open sky signals Nagisa’s admission that something has to change. This moment also serves as the catalyst for Uka’s classmate to begin searching for her missing friend, a decision that ultimately results in Uka’s rescue from the Kami No Ie shelter.

The openness of Tokyo cityscapes in these scenes suggests that the sort of hidden abuse endured by these young women needs to be brought into the open and exposed to the light of public scrutiny. Along those lines, I can’t help but feel that Kyō’s depictions of outdoor spaces in Kamimachi also reflect the artist’s emotional response to the Covid pandemic. For people in precarious situations, being physically stuck inside often exacerbated the experience of feeling trapped within oppressive social systems.

As an artist who documented the pandemic years through evocative illustrations posted to Instagram, Kyō’s project is not simply to depict the beauty of architecture and greenery within the city, but also to comment on the importance of open outdoor “third places” for young people suffering from social pressure and economic strain. Kamimachi doesn’t provide easy solutions, but it’s cathartic to see the issue of youth precarity brought out into the open air. 

Machiko Kyō is a prolific and award-winning artist whose illustration collections have been celebrated by The Comics Journal (here). If you’re interested in reading more about the artist’s work, I published a short essay on her 2013 graphic novel Cocoon – whose animated adaptation is scheduled to premiere on NHK in Summer 2025 – on Women Write About Comics (here). Here’s hoping that English-language readers will be able to experience Kyō’s compelling and thought-provoking work in the near future.

Hoshikuzu Kazoku

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Hoshikuzu Kazoku (星屑家族) is a two-volume graphic novel set in an alternate universe where parents are required to obtain a license to raise children. To qualify for a license, a prospective family is asked to undergo an audition with a homestay student. This auditor, who is often an orphan raised in a government-run facility, evaluates the family’s fitness by deliberately behaving badly and provoking difficult situations. 

An auditor who goes by Hikari is assigned to Daiki and Chisa Hirokawa, a young couple who live on the grounds of a Shinto shrine. During their initial interview, Daiki surprises Hikari by openly requesting that their family be denied a childrearing license. Daiki claims to be happy living with his wife as a couple, and he shares his suspicions that Chisa doesn’t actually want children. With that out of the way, Daiki says, the three of them can enjoy the homestay visit without any pressure or expectations.             

Chisa and Daiki genuinely seem to be happy together, but Hikari soon notices that Chisa is the target of a longstanding prejudice held by people in the neighborhood. Chisa’s mother killed her father when she was a child, and she’s been ostracized ever since. Along with her foster father, who once managed the shrine, Daiki was the only person who was kind to her. Now that she and Daiki have married and set up a household at the shrine, Chisa feels trapped within a community she can’t escape. Why, then, does she want a child so badly? And is it Hikari’s place to get involved?

Hoshikuzu Kazoku is a high-stakes family drama that presents a moral conundrum with no easy solutions. If the government creates regulations to ensure a well-ordered society, what happens to the people whose lives are more complicated than the provisions allowed by the legal code? If there’s room for flexibility in the bureaucratic system that enforces the law, who should have the right to grant exceptions? And more specifically, in a country witnessing its birth rate decline in response to the disintegration of community support structures, what are the limits of government intervention?

Even putting such questions aside, Hoshikuzu Kazoku is compelling by virtue of its problematic yet still sympathetic characters. Hikari, Daiki, and Chisa each bring loads of emotional baggage to the table, but they do their best to communicate to the limited extent of their abilities. Despite their many flaws and the odds against them, I wanted these characters to be happy.

Aki Poroyama’s writing, dialogue, and pacing are all excellent, and the visual language of the manga serves to set the mood and create dramatic impact. I wasn’t familiar with the work of this artist, and I was amazed by the polish of this graphic novel. I’d recommend Hoshikuzu Kazoku to mature readers looking for socially conscious speculative fiction driven by complicated human stories. 

Mornings With My Cat Mii

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Cats are adorable creatures, it’s true. It’s also true that they’re a little magical. Unfortunately, the experience of caring for a cat isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, and there’s a lot of cleaning involved. Mayumi Inaba’s autobiographical essay collection Mornings With My Cat Mii is a beautifully written attempt to capture the not-always-rosy reality of sharing your space with a cat while doing your best to manage your life as a human.

In the summer of 1977, Inaba follows the cries that drift in through her window and discovers a ball of fluff stuck at the top of a fence along the bank of the Tamagawa River in western Tokyo. Since it’s freezing outside, she takes the kitten home. Inaba names her “Mimi,” or “Mii” for short, after her constant crying. Despite her precarious childhood, Mii goes on to live for almost twenty years, accompanying the author through major developments in her personal life and career.     

Mayumi Inaba (1950-2014) worked in a number of creative industries while publishing stories, essays, and poetry. The opening essays in Mornings With My Cat Mii are about the milestones in Inaba’s life as she divorces her husband in Osaka to focus on her career in Tokyo. As time passes, Inaba begins to devote more attention to her friendships and psychological wellbeing, a shift in priorities represented by her growing love for Mii.

Mornings With My Cat Mii is far from wholesome, however. Inaba is nothing if not honest about the vicissitudes of life. Sometimes you and your partner grow distant. Sometimes you get kicked out of your house by your landlord. Sometimes people abandon animals. And sometimes you have to bear witness to your pet’s slow decline toward death.

A major element of Inaba’s commitment to honesty are her raw descriptions of the mess of keeping an animal in your house. Sometimes, for example, your entire apartment is going to smell like cat urine. Sometimes you have to scrub puke out of the carpet. Sometimes you have to extract your cat’s feces with your own hands.

Regardless, Inaba always finds a silver lining and an interesting story to tell. I especially enjoyed her essay “The Pet Sitter,” which provides an intriguing glimpse into the thriving industry of petcare services in Japan while digging its heels into the silliness of celebrity pet therapists. I also love “The Winter Break,” which describes a trip Inaba took to the countryside with her sister so Mii could touch grass and frolic in nature. The essay “Moving House” stands out as a playful description of a typical day in young Mii’s life in Inaba’s old house in the west Tokyo suburbs, which were still filled with pockets of nature in the 1970s.

Each essay is less than ten pages long, and most of them feature several verses of a poem as a postscript. Ginny Tapley Takemori has done a marvelous job translating Inaba’s poetry. Just be aware that some of these poems might make you a bit misty-eyed, especially if you’re feeling sentimental about the death of a pet of your own.

I’m generally not a fan of Japanese cat books, but Mornings With My Cat Mii isn’t bubblegum pop about how all of life’s problems can be magically solved by a cat. Rather, this is messy and honest nonfiction about the hardships of pursuing a creative career as a single woman. Still, Inaba manages to find moments of sweetness in life, which she generously shares with the reader in her soft and shining prose.

とんこつ Q&A

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とんこつ Q&A collects four stories by Natsuko Imamura, the author of The Woman in the Purple Skirt. Each of these stories is built on a cute and wholesome premise that develops in a dark and strange direction.

The title story is about a woman with social anxiety who creates a written script to help her navigate her job as a server at a small diner called Tonkotsu. Her efforts are aided by the recently widowed owner and his young son, who teaches the narrator to speak in Osaka dialect like his late mother.

The narrator’s script gradually expands beyond professional dialogue into everyday pleasantries, and she ultimately becomes a ghostwriter for the diner owner’s new wife. This scenario seems like a perfect set-up for a sweet and gentle romantic comedy, but it gradually becomes more disturbing as the narrator cheerfully crafts the diner owner’s new wife into a living doll.  

The three other stories in the collection are about middle school bullies whose punishment is far worse than their crime, an aggressively clueless wife who gets away with murder, and a very sketchy coworker. Imamura’s prose is smooth but cuts like a knife, and the situations she crafts are never what they seem. I wouldn’t say that these stories have twist endings, necessarily, but the way their wholesome coziness slowly sinks into social horror is fascinating to watch.

５２ヘルツのクジラたち

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５２ヘルツのクジラたち is a bestselling novel by Sonoko Machida that won the 2021 Japan Booksellers’ Award Grand Prize. In March 2024, the story was adapted into a feature film directed by Izuru Narushima, who worked with LGBTQ consultants in order to portray a key transgender character with the same compassion and sensitivity expressed by Machida’s novel.

Kiko Mishima has left Tokyo to move to a seaside town near Oita on the eastern coast of Kyushu. She’s inherited a house from her grandmother, and she gets along well with the contractors she hired for renovations. It’s difficult to adjust to life in a small community, however, and Kiko begins to withdraw into her house.

During a trip to the grocery store, Kiko encounters a 13yo boy who can’t speak and seems to have nowhere to go. The nameless boy bears undeniable signs of abuse and neglect, so Kiko invites him home and begins caring for him.

As the novel progresses, the reader learns more about Kiko, who was emotionally abused by her mother and stepfather. Circumstances relating to her stepfather’s health prevent Kiko from escaping from her family after high school, and she’s driven to the verge of suicide by her experience of serving as her stepfather’s primary caregiver.

Kiko is rescued by her high school friend Miharu, who also grew up in an abusive family. Miharu introduces Kiko to her colleague Ango, who sympathizes with Kiko and takes responsibility for her emotional support as he helps her move into a sharehouse and begin a new life.

From the beginning of the novel, the reader is confronted by numerous questions. Given how important Ango was to Kiko, what happened to him? Why did Kiko suddenly move to Kyushu without telling anyone? Where is she getting the money to renovate her house? And, most importantly, what can she do to help the abused boy whom the entire town has decided to ignore?

５２ヘルツのクジラたち takes its title from the story of 52 Blue, a whale of an unidentified species that has never been sighted but only heard via hydrophones. It sings at a frequency 52 hertz, which is much higher than the calls of other migrating whales. Because of the highly unusual sonic signature of its call, the whale migrates alone.

Kiko compares her isolation during her childhood to that of the 52-hertz whale, and she once listened to recordings of its singing to calm and ground herself after she left her family. She shares these recordings with the seemingly wordless boy she takes under her wing, promising that she’ll wait patiently until she can understand his own 52-hertz voice.   

We live in a society, however, and it’s not strictly legal to assume care of a minor without the permission of the child’s guardians. Thankfully, Miharu manages to track down Kiko and pays her a visit in Kyushu. She once again comes to the rescue, helping Kiko to reach out to the community for the support that she and the boy desperately need. 

Make no mistake, ５２ヘルツのクジラたち is an intensely melodramatic novel. Its characters are either saints or devils. It’s never explained why anyone would be abusive toward a child, or why most people who witness child abuse choose to ignore it. In addition, the story’s victims of abuse come off as perfect angels who suffer with dignity and almost never display any of the problematic behavior associated with a history of sustained childhood trauma.

I find this lack of psychological depth frustrating, as it glosses over many of the issues underlying child abuse, which is often known and tacitly tolerated by the larger community. Instead of serving as a meaningful model for how such abuse can be prevented, this novel feels more like a character drama that uses serious social issues for the sole purpose of generating heightened emotions. In addition, although the treatment of the central transgender character is sympathetic, I couldn’t help but shake my head at some of the tired narrative tropes applied to their story.

Still, I can’t deny that ５２ヘルツのクジラたち is a lot of fun to read. The pacing is excellent, and I was swept along by the story’s strong forward momentum. Although bittersweet, the ending is emotionally satisfying, as is the conclusion of Kiko’s character arc. I’d especially recommend this novel to fans of Banana Yoshimoto, as it feels like a progressive development of many of the themes explored in Kitchen, from a universal concern with love and loss to a more specific push for the legal rights of minors and transgender people. 

While the message of ５２ヘルツのクジラたち might have benefitted from more psychological nuance, Sonoko Machida makes a strong and compelling case for mutual aid and community action in which everyone in a society benefits by actively protecting the marginalized.

Belles Ruelles

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Belles Ruelles is a gorgeous full-color anthology that collects the work of eleven manga artists and illustrators, each of whom has been tasked with telling a story set in the fictional European town of Eufemia.

Eufemia has preserved its medieval cityscape while maintaining a lively community of established shops, young entrepreneurs, and cultures from all over the world. It’s filled with narrow alleys, charming old buildings, ivy-adorned walls, and even a bit of magic.

One of my favorite stories is Keiko Shiki’s “Spice,” in which the young assistant at a store specializing in herbal teas and cooking spices learns just how much love and care the store owner puts into perfecting her craft.

I also love Hiromi Matsuo’s “Soie Rouge,” in which a college student tastes the luxury of trying on a kimono for the first time. Every panel of this manga is an artistic masterpiece, and the writing gently guides the reader through the sartorial experience.

I’m happy to see that this anthology is the first in a series, because I’m very much looking forward to visiting Eufemia again soon. If you’re a fan of the fantasy European setting of Studio Ghibli movies like Kiki’s Delivery Service, I’d encourage you to take a trip yourself.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls

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In The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami returns to an earlier era of his writing. Although ostensibly set in the present, there’s a timeless quality to this story and its characters, who move through their lives entirely offline and largely cut off from contemporary society. In both the setting and scenario, Murakami borrows heavily from his own twentieth-century fiction, making The City and Its Uncertain Walls feel like more of a pastiche than an original work.

The first section of the novel alternates between the narrator’s recollections of the past and his descriptions of a low-fantasy dreamscape of the eponymous walled city. In the real world, the narrator recounts the progression of his teenage romance with a girl who eventually revealed that she was suffering from severe depression before sending a farewell letter and disappearing from his life. In the dream world, the adult narrator enters the walled city the girl once built from her imagination and encounters a ghost of her sixteen-year-old self.

At an almost detail-by-detail level of fidelity, the walled city is lifted directly from the “End of the World” segments of Murakami’s 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, while the bittersweet teenage romance is strongly reminiscent of his 1987 novel Norwegian Wood.

This was a slow opening for me, as it’s territory Murakami has covered many times before. Perhaps a different reader might have a different impression; but, since I’ve already read Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World many times during the past two decades, I often found myself skimming through this section.

The story becomes somewhat more interesting in the second section, when the forty-year-old narrator wakes from the dream of the walled city, leaves his job at a book distribution company, and moves to a small town in the mountains of Fukushima prefecture to manage a privately owned library. The narrator is welcomed by the former head librarian, a gentle elderly man named Mr. Koyasu. With the support of the library staff, the quiet days pass pleasantly enough, but there’s something strange about Mr. Koyasu, who seems to come from nowhere as he pleases before returning to nothing at the end of his visits.

In many ways, this second section feels like a retread of Murakami’s 2017 novel Killing Commendatore, whose narrator undergoes a similar midlife crisis and moves to a small town in the mountains. There are also echoes of the rural library in Shikoku that serves as the setting for the last half of the 2002 novel Kafka on the Shore. Thankfully, this section doesn’t exhibit the same fidelity of borrowing as the first, and I was intrigued by the gradual reveals concerning Mr. Koyasu’s life and interest in the narrator.

Toward the end of the second section, it seems the plot will finally move forward when the narrator is introduced to one of the library’s most faithful patrons, a teenage boy on the autism spectrum. The boy knows about the walled town, and he wants the narrator to take him there. Unfortunately, this is when the story begins to lose its threads, and it falls apart into a tangle of long conversations in which characters repeat the same information without actually saying anything. Even at the abstract metafictional level of Murakami’s beloved “symbols” and “metaphors,” the ending feels rushed and unsatisfying.

In his “Afterword,” Murakami explains that he began The City and Its Uncertain Walls during the pandemic as a return to a story of the same title that he originally published in 1980. I understand the drive to return to familiar themes in order to view them from unexplored angles, but the problem with this novel is that there’s nothing new or different in its approach. If I were feeling cynical, I might even say that The City and Its Uncertain Walls feels as though it’s been assembled as something of a “Best of Murakami” album intended to market the author’s work to new readers.

I enjoyed the experience of reading The City and Its Uncertain Walls, but it didn’t resonate with me emotionally. More than anything, this book inspires nostalgia for Murakami’s earlier novels. Given the story’s refusal to address any social, political, or cultural developments since 1980, I’d say that “nostalgia” is probably going to be its main appeal for many readers. There’s value to seeking shelter in the imagination as a defense against the demands of neoliberal capitalism, but The City and Its Uncertain Walls has nothing to do with resistance; this is pure self-indulgence. As in the walled city of the narrator’s dreams, nothing much happens here, and time passes comfortably but without meaning.

Nails and Eyes

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Kaori Fujino’s Nails and Eyes collects a novella and two short stories whose crystal-clear prose is darkened by the shadow of creeping psychological horror. The theme of family lies at the heart of these stories, especially as it intersects with the fear that those closest to us may deliberately choose not to see obvious but unpleasant truths.

In the third story, “Minute Fears,” a woman named Mika plans to attend the wedding reception of a college friend. Since she’s started a family, Mika has rarely gone out on her own, and she’s been looking forward to the party. Her son Daiki begs her not to go, as he’s been disturbed by an urban legend surrounding a ghost rumored to haunt the local playground. After a brief struggle with Daiki, who doesn’t want to be left alone, Mika goes to the reception late and leaves early. When she comes home, Daiki confesses his fear of the ghost, and Mika resolves to take him to the playground herself to prove that the urban legend isn’t true.

Whether the ghost exists is left to the reader’s imagination. Instead, the true horror lies in the image of Mika dragging her terrified son into the night. Or perhaps, if your sympathies lie elsewhere, the horror is hidden in the homebound years that Mika has had to endure in order to care for her child while her friends enjoy their lives and careers in the outside world. 

The second story, “What Shoko Forgets,” is equally ambiguous yet just as disturbing. After a mild stroke, Shoko has been living in an elder care facility for almost half a year. Her family visits regularly, and she receives ample attention from the staff. A polite and energetic young man named Kawabata is especially gentle, and he seems to have a special fondness of Shoko.

There’s something strange about Kawabata’s behavior after dark, however; and, for some reason, Shoko finds herself thinking about sex in a way she hasn’t for years. It’s possible that there might be a connection between Kawabata and the man Shoko imagines lying next to her at night, but both her eyesight and her memory have grown hazy. In any case, it’s no use trying to explain her muddled thoughts about the situation to her daughter or granddaughter, who so kindly come to visit a forgetful old woman.

The collection’s centerpiece novella, “Nails and Eyes,” is narrated from the perspective of a young girl who lost her mother to an unexplained incident. Her father brings home his younger lover, and the narrator addresses this woman directly through the story. She recounts the minute details of the woman’s life, from her affair with a bookstore owner to her obsession with the home décor blog once maintained by the narrator’s mother.

The narrator also describes her own behavior as a child who has clearly been traumatized by her mother’s suicide but largely ignored by the adults in her life. The narrator refuses to be anywhere near the balcony where her mother died, and she sits in the corners of the apartment gnawing at her nails, which become serrated and sharp. To her credit, the woman responsible for the child’s care makes a clean break with her lover and begins to take a more active interest in her charge’s welfare. This change of heart comes too late, however, and the story ends with an incredibly upsetting psychological break.

To be clear: if you have phobias related to eyes and/or fingernails, this book might not be for you. 

At 140 pages, Nails and Eyes is easy to breeze through, especially in Kendall Heitzman’s smooth and weightless translation. Still, Fujino’s fiction rewards time and attention, as well as repeated readings. There are layers to her deceptively simple prose, and any one of these stories has the potential to generate multiple lines of speculation. Nails and Eyes is a fascinating and disquieting collection that will be appreciated by readers who enjoy literary short horror fiction like Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge and Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire.

A Woman of Pleasure

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Kiyoko Murata’s A Woman of Pleasure is a feminist novel about the self-liberation of Japanese sex workers in the early twentieth century. It’s also a vibrant window into a different world and a true pleasure to read. Murata’s work has won almost every major Japanese literary prize, and Juliet Winters Carpenter has crafted a beautiful translation of her writing.

A Woman of Pleasure is set in 1903 in the adult entertainment district of Kumamoto, where the fifteen-year-old Ichi has been sold by her impoverished family to a high-ranking brothel. While she apprentices under a senior geisha, Ichi also attends literacy classes run by a retired entertainer named Tetsuko.

Ichi’s honest yet playful diary entries are interspersed between third-person accounts of her everyday life, the mundanity of which comprises the bulk of the novel. Despite the unfairness of her situation, Murata portrays Ichi with sympathy and dignity, as well as with a welcome touch of light humor.  

While the last fifty pages of the book describe how the women at Ichi’s establishment decide to exercise their legal right to leave, the majority of the story explains – very gently – why they would choose to do so. For a contemporary reader, there’s a lot to be upset about, but Murata never degrades her characters or their agency in shaping the course of their lives.

A Woman of Pleasure reminds me a great deal of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s classic novel The Makioka Sisters. Despite several startling and high-tension incidents, the book doesn’t have much of a plot. This is to its benefit, I think, as what’s interesting about Ichi’s story would be ruined by melodrama. Murata’s project is first and foremost to celebrate the essential humanity of the women who lived in a different era, but she also presents a compelling demonstration of how normal, ordinary people are capable of powerful political action.

Tree in the Middle of the World

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世界の真ん中の木 (Tree in the Middle of the World) is a lushly illustrated picture book written and drawn by Makiko Futaki, a former animator at Studio Ghibli. Originally published in 1989, this book is now available in a beautiful hardcover edition that allows the full glory of the artwork to shine.

In the Afterword to the original softcover edition published by Animage, Futaki wrote that she was inspired to create this story after visiting the Yakushima natural heritage forest, where she conducted visual research for My Neighbor Totoro. Despite its young protagonists and verdant greenery, however, Tree in the Middle of the World is a complex ecofable that has more in common with Princess Mononoke. 

A preteen girl named Cici lives in the mountains with her grandmother. Their small cottage lies at the base of the gargantuan “tree in the middle of the world,” and their modest livelihood is supported by its ecosystem. One year, the tree’s cycle of seasons goes strangely awry, and the sapling Cici attempts to grow from one of the tree’s seeds withers. Hoping to learn more about the malady affecting the tree, Cici resolves to speak with the legendary golden bird that lives in its uppermost branches.

During her epic three-day climb, Cici realizes that the state of the tree’s health is far more dire than she suspected. To make matters worse, she seems to be followed by a young archer from the steppes named Dimo. Dimo is an inexperienced speaker of Cici’s language, but he manages to communicate that he intends to kill the very bird she seeks. Thankfully, Cici does not have to bear her worries alone. Early in her climb, she gains a travel companion in the form of a talking frog whose avuncular good nature serves as a welcome relief from the hardships of her journey.

When Cici finally finds the golden bird, she learns that it has gone insane in its old age, and the putrescence it sheds from its rotting feathers is the cause of the tree’s sickness. Just as he intended, Dimo appears in the nick of time to slay the bird, which answers Cici’s question with its dying breath – in order to save the tree, Cici must venture underground to scatter the tree’s seeds below its roots.

This is a fearsome undertaking, to be sure, but Dimo promises to lend his aid. The two children thus embark on a second journey that proves to be just as dangerous as the first. Just when all hope seems lost in the darkness, Cici and Dimo arrive on the shore of a golden sea that might just be the very stream of life itself. Having succeeded in the quest, the two children return to the surface, where the first winds of spring greet them with verdant laurels of fresh greenery.

Although I’ve outlined the contours of the story, Tree in the Middle of the World is a substantial book whose plot contains a number of twists, turns, and quiet spaces for rest and contemplation in between. The writing is simple but evocative, especially during the portion of the story that takes place underground. Miraculously, every page boasts gorgeous illustrations, each of which is more magical than the last.

Tree in the Middle of the World reminds me a great deal of Hayao Miyazaki’s Shuna’s Journey, albeit with two key differences. First, the visual layout of Tree in the Middle of the World makes its text much clearer and easier to read than the text in Shuna’s Journey; and second, Futaki is far more focused on guiding the reader along a journey through the space of a fixed setting. Like Shuna’s Journey, however, Tree in the Middle of the World contains moments of genuine fear and menace that might not be appropriate for younger children.

Tree in the Middle of the World doesn’t skirt around the shadows of its themes. Like everything in nature, the life of the giant tree exists in cycles, as does that of the giant bird that nests in its branches. Sometimes, like Cici, we find ourselves at the end of a cycle, and there’s not much we can do to prevent the death and destruction we see everywhere around us. Still, it’s our responsibility to preserve the seeds of what we hold dear and plant them carefully in the hope that they will grow strong and healthy in the future when the cycle turns once again.

Tree in the Middle of the World is an uplifting and optimistic story guided by a fantastic sense of adventure. Through her luminous artwork, Futaki conveys the joy of being surrounded by green and growing things, and the action is easy to follow even if your Japanese reading ability isn’t perfect – or if you don’t read Japanese at all. If nothing else, it’s impossible to read Tree in the Middle of the World and not feel inspired to go outside and interact with the world with a renewed sense of hope and purpose.