A Children’s Book That Actually Feels Like Childhood

One of the perks of parenthood, it is often said, is to relive the joys of one’s youth, to share with your child everything you once loved—especially 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’s ubiquitous “Busytown” books, which I had remembered mainly for Lowly Worm and Scarry’s quaint drawings of paint tubes and cross sections of houses, are almost intolerably didactic, it turns out—focussed on shaming children into good manners and riddled with (canine) police. Other books suggest the violence once tolerated against children: in the poetic “Bedtime for Frances” (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.

Our family discovered “Sato the Rabbit,” by Yuki Ainoya, in much the same way that the series’ 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’s books to read to their baby. The first installment in the Sato series—there are four—opens with a figure getting dressed in a white rabbit suit. “One day, Haneru Sato became a rabbit,” Ainoya writes. “He’s 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?” What follows are several six- and eight-page stories. Sato’s 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 “Chirr chirrr chirrrr.” Several vignettes entail Sato sitting or lying on the ground.

The tone here recalls “Goodnight Moon,” which is content to let the reader take in a room, a drowsy atmosphere—but “Goodnight Moon” 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.

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’s hand—a walnut, say—grows over the course of a story until it becomes an entire cosmos in itself. “Sometimes the walnuts have especially wonderful things inside,” Ainoya writes— “shelves of delicious bread on one side, and fragrant hot coffee on the other,” or a “warm bath” and a “comfy bed.” “The insides of one walnut are as dark as a cave. / So he covers his eyes like this. / It’s pitch black at first, but after a little while . . . / it becomes a sky filled with stars.” 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. “There’s tons of little Easter eggs in there,” Blaskowsky told me. In “Watermelon,” he pointed out, a seagull on Sato’s spoon “becomes the seagull on the watermelon on the next page. It takes the eyes of a kid to notice all that stuff.”

Blaskowsky understood Sato’s magic immediately, and pitched a translation to Enchanted Lion, a children’s-book press based in New York. “If we are seeking to do anything,” Claudia Bedrick, Enchanted Lion’s publisher, told me in an e-mail, “it is to show and share the idea that magic, beauty, charm, surprise, whimsy, and the wonder saturated dimensions of life are not ‘surreal,’ but rather a part of the real and our interaction with the world itself.”

The Sato books encourage parents to meet their children where they are—in a space of focussed exploration—rather 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?