Square 16mo. (40)pp. Kurosaki's delightful illustrations throughout detail all the joys of a Japanese childhood, from toys to parties to days spent swimming in a lake, all following the progression of the seasons. The designs are notably devoid of Western imagery, save a strange inclusion of Santa Claus flying above a snowy rooftop. Kurosaki's work, then, preserves a quality of Japanese culture that increasingly, since the end of WWII and the beginning of the American Occupation, had become Westernized. There is no overt indication of the war or the devastating effects of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kurosaki's place of birth, but the whole nevertheless is a quiet negotiation of Japanese expression and identity. Though a children's production, the book then is certainly part of the larger movement in post-war Japanese art toward the aesthetic, and often entrenched and repressed, reacquaintance with nationhood, an imperative also communicated in the films of Ysujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa. Bound in pictorial wrappers, fairly toned but minorly rubbed, and accompanied by a typescript translation into English. Near fine and very rare, with only one copy listed in OCLC.