Title: Shirobamba - Yasushi Inoué - book
Summary :
It was during the fourth or fifth year of the Taishô era, about forty years ago. The children used to run here and there on the village road in the evening, shouting "The shirobamba! The shirobamba!" They were chasing these little white creatures that floated like flakes of cotton wool in the sky, beginning to take on the colors of twilight." All Japanese know this novel by heart. In the abundant work of Yasushi Inoué, it is undoubtedly the freshest, the most charming. Very largely autobiographical, it tells the story of the childhood at the beginning of the century of a little boy named Kôsaku. Like Inoué himself, he grew up not with his parents, but with his great-grandfather's mistress, a former geisha. Between the little boy and the old woman a tender relationship is woven, a somewhat magical complicity, presented in the form of a series of exquisite little naive paintings in bright colors...
