I bought this book for a friend once and when I was in the Japanese bookstore yesterday, couldn’t resist buying another one for myself. It’s so so beautiful. It’s a Japanese picture book but they have an English version. The paper throughout is very thin and delicate like tracing paper so you can see what’s coming next in the story. The artist Yoshie Watanabe plays with this transparency in really clever ways. For example while a girl is jumping rope the next pages have the rope at different stages in the rotation. Because of the thickness of the paper, each one is a little less visible giving a sense of space to the scene. The style of illustration is really sweet and warm which matches the poetic words about about going on a journey but feeling like your missing something. Although I debated categorizing this as children’s book, I think it’s not actually for children even if the pictures seem so. I found this shop that sells it and if you google you can probably find a few others.
Update: A few copies are available through Amazon sellers here!

© Julia Rothman 2007