Momoko's Illustrated Book of Living Things by Momoko Sakura, translated by James M. Vardaman, Jr. (Shueisha)

Momoko Sakura is a Japanese manga artist. She is the creator of one of Japan's longest running anime series titled Chibi Maruko-chan whose exploits are based on Sakura’s own experiences as an elementary school girl growing up in Shimizu, Japan in Shizuoka Prefecture. She is also the author of a number of essays and Momoko’s Story (Asia by the Book, January 2025)

Momoko’s Illustrated Book of Living Things or いきもの図鑑,as it was originally titled, was first published as a series of essays in the fashion magazine an an. When she was first approached to write a column in the magazine, she decided, “I’ll write about my memories of various living things. On a subject like this, I could write forever.”

However, she found that writing about “living things” every week wasn’t as easy as she first thought. She found that there were times when she had no special memories about a creature which made it hard for her to write. She says in her Afterword, “Memories are not something that can be forcibly manufactured and they do have to be related to the subject.” She takes her argument one step further saying, “Even if I had wanted to write about anteaters, for example, I couldn’t write an essay unless I had actually something to do with one.”

She has classified the animals she talks about into five separate categories—insects, fish, birds, animals, and everything else. As her family ran a vegetable shop, one of her earliest memories of “living things” is about the green caterpillar. Momoko writes, “Whenever my older sister’s shriek was followed by a head of cabbage rolling across the floor, it was the sign that she had found a caterpillar.”

Momoko liked bugs and she would collect the caterpillars. She liked to keep many of them in a box. She liked watching the caterpillars turn to pupa but wondered how wings could be growing under the thin skin and how the caterpillar would turn into a butterfly. 

Another “living thing” Momoko writes about is earthworms. When she was in the second grade, her family used to keep some small fish called guppies as pets. The guppies fed on the earthworms. She used to go out with her father to any ditch nearby and would find lots of earthworms. 

One day while she was out looking for earthworms with her father, a boy about her own age asked her what she was doing. She was too embarrassed to tell him that she was looking for earthworms and just replied, “Nothing.” What shocked her though was that the boy said, “If you aren’t doing anything, do you want to play.” It never occurred to her to play with a boy before. She was a little flustered and told him, “I won’t.” The boy was insistent until Momoko’s father’s voice could be heard saying, “Hey, there are worms over here!” The boy left without a word. 

Every memory Momoko has about a “living thing” may seem ordinary but the way she talks about each and every one of them makes the readers feel as if each and every “living thing” is special. I’m sure we all have our own memories of “living things”—that pet dog or hamster, the family cat or even an aquarium full of tropical fish, but Momoko has a way of making each “living thing” larger than life. ~Ernie Hoyt