Book review, Tokyo – I picked up 『生きる』(Ikiru, lit. Live) at the bookstore the other day and remember being drawn to it by the everyday scene on its cover. A three-storey block of flats coloured by several futons hanging out to air on some balconies. A bicycle stand peeks out from the corner of the cover, just like how they are always in some accessible yet hidden corner of the compound. A boy reaches over the railings of the first floor unit balcony for his cap from his mother while two women chat across the common backyard over the chest-high fence – one on her balcony, the other in the shade of her umbrella. On the third floor, a man stretches to his side while a boy looks down at the scene below through the balcony railings as his mother hangs the laundry. It’s a warm and summery kind of day.

In the pages within, Yoshiro Okamoto‘s illustrations give shape to the musings on living life in Shuntaro Tanikawa’s 1971 poem. The poem begins, “To live / is to live now, in this moment” and continues
“that’s to feel thirsty
to squint from the sun shining through the trees
recall some fond melody
or sneeze
or just hold your hand
To live
is to live now, in this moment
a mini skirt
the planetarium
Johan Strauss
Picasso
the Alps
To experience all things beautiful
and to beware of hidden dangers…”

As Tanikawa words prompt us to look, see, think, feel, imagine and interact – live – as we read it, so do Okamoto’s illustrations of everyday scenes from a pedestrian crossing, a room looking out into the garden, to a row of shops with people walking by as other wait for a bus. We are invited to use all of our selves to hear a dog barking somewhere faraway, think about the earth rotating on its axis, hear the cry of a newborn baby somewhere, the cry of a soldier being wounded someplace, a swing swinging, to see now becoming the past just now.

In an interview, Tanikawa revealed that he didn’t think this poem was particularly well-written, because some of the verses were just names or things. It was intentional. Leaving verses incomplete (or as he says, frayed) was so that people try to act on it – live – as they read. Living life was different from making a living, he opined. Before the picture book project, the poem had already inspired photobooks and other publications, but the editor found reason for creating a picture book for children in the wake of the 3.11 earthquake and disaster – to help them see the joys of just being alive in the moment.

They created 35 dummies and decided on the one that opened with a belly-up cicada being found by ants. And so the picture book inspired by a poem on living life would start with a picture of death. Life and death are two ends of one continuum, two sides of the same coin. And the pictures are full of hints and prompts to live life, to experience and savor it, instead of fearing death and living in a way as to avoid it. Of course, there is sound advice to “beware of hidden dangers” while enjoying the ride, which we will do well to remember.

More today than in any given era, we are being constantly bombarded with prompts and distractions that prise our attentions away from our immediate surroundings, making us forget our capacity to be in the here and now. Taking the time to flip through this book gave me renewed consciousness of my being, a most gratifying experience of remembering what it is to be alive.

『生きる』(Ikiru, lit. To live) by Shuntaro Tanikawa, illustrated by Yoshiro Okamoto
Publisher: Fukuinkan Shoten, 2017