Description

Omoide de Ippai ni Nattara

Mio Hashimoto

One day, I saw something swaying from the tree in my garden. I knew straight away that it was a nature spirit, a guardian protecting my home.” Told from the perspective of a cat named Tom, this picture book follows the precious days he spent with a spirit.

Author’s Message (from her blog):

“While I primarily work in sculpture, I sometimes create picture books to convey things that sculpture cannot express. One of those works is the picture book, ‘The Day the Spirit Cried’ (*). When something painful or joyful happens, we often pray to a god, saying things like, ‘Please, god,’ or ‘Thank you, god,’ even though we don’t know what form the gods might take. I don’t believe in any particular god, but for me, a bagworm moth was the guardian deity of our home. Seventeen years ago, my home was hit by a big earthquake during the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. When I fled outside, the first thing I saw was a tiny bagworm caterpillar swaying back and forth from a tree in our garden. Just a child, it seemed to me that this bagworm, even as it was being shaken around by the big earthquake, was protecting our home from its own teeny tiny house.

From then on, for me, the bagworm was the deity of our house, and every morning on my way to school, I would greet this spirit and watch it. A few years later, a small, mischievous black and white cat came to live with us, and he was always sat on the pillar next to the tree where the spirit used to hang. During my spare time at art school, I started drawing a picture book about that small spirit, pouring my feelings into the book through Tom, the black and white cat. That book is ‘The Day the Spirit Cried.’

(*) This book, “Full of Memories,” is a redrawn and revised version of “The Day the Spirit Cried.” The original title was chosen by the publisher, Tully’s Coffee Japan, and published in 2008. For this new edition, the author chose the title, “Full of Memories.”

About Author

Mio Hashimoto, Sculptor

From her studio in an old house in Mie Prefecture, Hashimoto uses the wood of Camphor trees to create life like carvings of animals. Modelled after those that are living or have lived in this world, she aims to create sculptures that allow viewers to feel as though they are meeting those animals once more. She is currently holding solo exhibitions at art museums throughout Japan.

When she was 15 years old, after the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, she saw a bagworm moth caterpillar dangling down from a Camphor tree in her family home and believed it to be a ‘kami’, or spirit. Several years later, she took in a cat named Tom. This book reflects on true events that occurred in the ten years that followed, also conveying her own feelings through the characters of the spirit and the cat.