{"id":43556,"date":"2025-09-25T23:36:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T23:36:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/43556\/"},"modified":"2025-09-25T23:36:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T23:36:09","slug":"a-childrens-book-that-actually-feels-like-childhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/43556\/","title":{"rendered":"A Children\u2019s Book That Actually Feels Like Childhood"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the perks of parenthood, it is often said, is to relive the joys of one\u2019s youth, to share with your child everything you once loved\u2014especially books. Before I was a parent, I was skeptical of this idea, being generally suspicious of nostalgia and knowing memory to be a poor replica of reality. And, indeed, there are many things designed for children that, as an adult, rub the wrong way. Richard Scarry\u2019s ubiquitous \u201cBusytown<\/a>\u201d books, which I had remembered mainly for Lowly Worm and Scarry\u2019s quaint drawings of paint tubes and cross sections of houses, are almost intolerably didactic, it turns out\u2014focussed on shaming children into good manners and riddled with (canine) police. Other books suggest the violence once tolerated against children: in the poetic \u201cBedtime for Frances<\/a>\u201d (1960), by Russell Hoban, a badger is finally coerced into bed by the threat of a spanking. More recent entries forgo the tyranny of parenting styles past but fail to beguile children, giving them nothing to work through. The high-contrast cartoon board books that kids eat up today can feel like brain rot to the adults forced to read them, aloud, several times in a row.<\/p>\n

Our family discovered \u201cSato the Rabbit<\/a>,\u201d by Yuki Ainoya, in much the same way that the series\u2019 translator, Michael Blaskowsky, did: at the library, as one of many books hastily chosen with a small child in tow. In 2017, Blaskowsky and his wife, who then lived in Seattle, were searching for Japanese-language children\u2019s books to read to their baby. The first installment in the Sato series\u2014there are four\u2014opens with a figure getting dressed in a white rabbit suit. \u201cOne day, Haneru Sato became a rabbit,\u201d Ainoya writes. \u201cHe\u2019s been a rabbit ever since. He likes stars, the ocean, and tasty treats. He likes lots of other things, too. What is Sato doing today? What is he going to do tomorrow?\u201d What follows are several six- and eight-page stories. Sato\u2019s costume is not quite a refusal of adulthood or a retreat to the animal world; his routines are deeply rooted in daily life. He bakes a blueberry cake, eats watermelon, sips milk before bed, and waters the garden. The seasons turn. The bugs go \u201cChirr chirrr chirrrr.\u201d Several vignettes entail Sato sitting or lying on the ground.<\/p>\n

The tone here recalls \u201cGoodnight Moon<\/a>,\u201d which is content to let the reader take in a room, a drowsy atmosphere\u2014but \u201cGoodnight Moon\u201d is meant to nudge children toward the final destination of sleep. Sato has no such drive or agenda. The rare time he goes to sleep for the night is after he retrieves the reflection of the moon from the surface of a lake, dries it by the fire, and wraps himself in it. The illustrations, also by Ainoya, are soft, impressionistic, and highly functional, showing Sato each step of the way. He never interacts with any other characters, though sometimes they appear in parallel, also decked out in animal suits.<\/p>\n

The genius of the series lies not in plot or dialogue but in its treatment of the world of objects. Something that can be easily held in the palm of one\u2019s hand\u2014a walnut, say\u2014grows over the course of a story until it becomes an entire cosmos in itself. \u201cSometimes the walnuts have especially wonderful things inside,\u201d Ainoya writes\u2014 \u201cshelves of delicious bread on one side, and fragrant hot coffee on the other,\u201d or a \u201cwarm bath\u201d and a \u201ccomfy bed.\u201d \u201cThe insides of one walnut are as dark as a cave.\u00a0\/\u00a0So he covers his eyes like this. \/ It\u2019s pitch black at first, but after a little while\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0\/\u00a0it becomes a sky filled with stars.\u201d On the final page of this story, Sato sits on the grass outside a giant walnut that has become a house. He cuts a watermelon in half and closes his eyes to savor the flavor. When he opens them, the halved watermelon is a boat, which Sato spends the afternoon munching and sailing. \u201cThere\u2019s tons of little Easter eggs in there,\u201d Blaskowsky told me. In \u201cWatermelon,\u201d he pointed out, a seagull on Sato\u2019s spoon \u201cbecomes the seagull on the watermelon on the next page. It takes the eyes of a kid to notice all that stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blaskowsky understood Sato\u2019s magic immediately, and pitched a translation to Enchanted Lion, a children\u2019s-book press based in New York. \u201cIf we are seeking to do anything,\u201d Claudia Bedrick, Enchanted Lion\u2019s publisher, told me in an e-mail, \u201cit is to show and share the idea that magic, beauty, charm, surprise, whimsy, and the wonder saturated dimensions of life are not \u2018surreal,\u2019 but rather a part of the real and our interaction with the world itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Sato books encourage parents to meet their children where they are\u2014in a space of focussed exploration\u2014rather than relentlessly pulling kids toward adulthood through narratives that educate or pontificate. In fact, reading them in the bright quiet of morning, with an attentive child, feels like childhood itself. It feels like sitting on a swing, looking out into a park, and losing oneself in thought for a moment. Or like taking a long walk as it slowly grows darker and the temperature drops. In other words, the books stir not only the imagination but something more elusive: states of feeling. We parents often extol the virtues of boredom, but how often do we join in?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the perks of parenthood, it is often said, is to relive the joys of one\u2019s youth,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43557,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[288,290,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-43556","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-childrens-books","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}