Tag Komako Sakai

The Bear and the Wildcat

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The Bear and the Wildcat
Kazumi Yumoto and Komako Sakai
Gecko Press


‘One morning, Bear was crying. His best friend, a little bird, was dead.’ So begins this deeply moving, poignant story of friendship, loss, grief and finally, hope.

Bear fashions a small wooden box and gently places the bird inside. He carries the box everywhere showing it to other animals he meets. They admire its beauty but failing to understand why Bear takes the box around, tell him to forget his friend.

Bear returns home and shuts himself away for several days but one morning sunshine streaming through the window wakes him. This prompts him to venture outside and as he walks along the riverbank, he comes upon a wildcat dozing at the waterside; beside him are a battered rucksack and a strangely-shaped box.

The latter interests Bear who wants to know what’s inside. The wildcat agrees to show him on condition Bear opens his box too.
The wildcat listens as Bear tells his story, realising that he must miss the friend he’d loved deeply. It’s the first time anybody else has acknowledged this to Bear. In return wildcat opens his box, takes out his violin and offers to play a song for Bear’s friend. As he does so, Bear remembers some of the times he and Bird had spent happily together

and in so doing Bear’s sadness begins to lift and he starts to heal. He decides it’s time to bury his friend and with the wildcat’s help they create a final resting place for the little bird.

The wildcat invites Bear to accompany him on his travels, he gives him a well-used tambourine and together the two animals move on, travelling the world and making music.

Kazumi Yumoto’s text is lyrically and lovingly written; and is accompanied by Komako Sakai’s soft edged, smudgy black and white images, which become infused with touches of pink as Bear begins to recall the happy memories and accept his friend’s death.

A beautiful book to offer comfort to those experiencing loss, and an opportunity to talk about death and grief with younger children.

Counting with Tiny Cat / The Fox Wish

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Counting with Tiny Cat
Viviane Schwarz
Walker Books
Tiny Cat is an energetic bundle of mischief with a particular penchant for red wool. At the outset there isn’t any but then yippee! A ball of the red stuff rolls right along. That quickly becomes TWO! THREE! FOUR! Which is all the creature can really juggle; but still they keep coming.

Clearly Tiny Cat’s counting skills have yet to develop further, though oddly the feline’s vocabulary encompasses ‘ABOUT A DOZEN– emphasis on the about here I should add.

Still though, the creature’s appetite for the red stuff isn’t satisfied: ‘LOTS’ leads to a very greedy ‘AS MANY AS YOU CAN GET’ but even that isn’t sufficient. SOME EXTRA gives way to …

Will the frisky thing ever realise that enough is enough?
A wonderful visual comedy with a delightfully playful star: Tiny Cat most definitely commands the performance, and viewers will definitely demand instant encores.

The Fox Wish
Kimiko Aman and Komako Sakai
Chronicle Books
A small girl – the narrator – and her younger brother return to the playground in search of the skipping rope left behind earlier. There’s no sign of their rope but they follow some sounds of laughter and in the clearing, come upon, not the friends they’d anticipated. but a group of foxes enjoying a skipping game.

“Doxy, foxy, / touch the ground. / Doxy, foxy, / turn around. / Turn to the east, / and turn to the west, / and choose the one that / you like best.”
The children decide the foxes are less adept skippers than they on account of their tails and Luke lets out a giggle. Fortunately the foxes aren’t offended: instead they approach the children and ask for some coaching. Soon animals and humans are playing together happily, taking turns to hold the rope ends. When the little girl’s turn comes to do so, she notices the name, painted on the handle.

It’s her name, but also happens to be that of one of the foxes; and, the little creature has assumed it now belongs to her because of a wish she’d made.
Does the little fox’s wish come true: what does the little girl decide to do?
A wonderful, slightly whimsical tale of empathy, altruism and kindness, and a delightful portrayal of the way young children so easily slip between fantasy and reality, told with sensitivity that is captured equally in Sakai’s glowing illustrations and Aman’s words, which in their direct simplicity, echo the voice of a child. Such exquisite observation.

I’ve signed the charter 

From Small Beginnings ….

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Who Woke the Baby?
Jane Clarke and Charles Fuge
Nosy Crow
Using the narrative structure of The House that Jack Built as a basis, Jane Clarke has penned a wonderful rhyming tale set in the jungle early one morning. But what has woken that baby who’s ‘smelly and yelly and all forlorn.’? Well, Hippo yawned, Zebra fussed, Lion roared, Crocodile snapped,

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Frog croaked and Bee buzzed. And what about that stunningly coloured butterfly that just happened to float along and land gently on the particular flower occupied by Busy Bee …
If nothing else, it’s certainly caused a change of mood in that baby gorilla, no longer forlorn but full of delighted giggles and gurgles, as it watches the dancing butterfly in the sunlight.

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The story reads aloud beautifully and Fuge’s eye-catching illustrations convey the changing moods of the various animals with verve and a droll, at times befittingly languid, humour.
This should be a real winner with early years listeners.

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Emily’s Balloon
Komako Sakai
Chronicle Books
What a quiet, gentle unassuming book but such a delight is this story about a little girl and her balloon. We follow the course of the interplay between the  child and the balloon during the course of a single day, as the girl becomes ever more enchanted by the object that has assumed the role of friend. Once her mother has devised a tethering device, the girl and balloon enter a special world of their own as they play in the yard.

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But then their blissful idyll is interrupted by a sudden gust of wind that whisks the balloon aloft depositing it in the branches of a tall tree. Try as she might, Emily’s mother is unable to retrieve it and it’s a very sad little girl who sits at the dinner table contemplating what might have been …

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Despite her mother’s promise to get a ladder and rescue the balloon in the morning, Emily goes to bed worrying about her precious object until, through her bedroom window, she spies its comforting moon-like presence glowing outside in the darkness.
This is one of those books that really stays with you, so tenderly realized are those moments shared between Emily and her balloon, and Emily and her mother …

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conveyed through the sparely worded text and enormously eloquent drawings executed in minimal colours. Each and every vignette speaks volumes about the precious vulnerability and innocence of early childhood and the way children can get enormous pleasure from very ordinary everyday objects.

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