Katzuko Yamamoto’s Litto

Katzuko Yamamoto, Litto (©2020, translation by Junko Ishii Blades & Peter Cummins, Monomori Books 2023)

This is a sweet Japanese children’s story about the power of innocence.

Litto is a little dog (I believe ‘litto’ is a Japanese rendition of the English ‘little’), whose naive kindness wins through in a series of dangerous encounters – not only enabling him to escape but giving rise to transformations in his would-be attackers and captors. The book is illustrated by the author with line drawings that perfectly match the charming simplicity of the tale.

The story is accompanied by two essays explaining that it was inspired by the late Kazuo Murakami, an eminent geneticist who came to believe that the enormous complexity of human genes and DNA implies the existence of what he calls ‘Something Great’ guiding the course of events. In the book, this Something Great is called Gashuda. In an essay here, ‘Living in gratitude to Something Great’, he discusses the Covid pandemic, and to my mind comes dangerously close to saying that a positive mental attitude will protect from it. Certainly he argued, with evidence, that human genes can be ‘awakened’ to dramatic effect by mental and emotional factors.

Though I’m happy to be alerted to Professor Murakami’s work, and now have his book The Divine Code of Life on my radar, I can’t help feeling that Litto would have worked better as a book without the earnest weight of its supporting material.

Page 76 provides a taste of the writing. Litto has found a loving home with a girl named Ollie and her mother, a baker whose secret is that she always bakes with love:

One day, a lot of orders for bread came to Ollie’s mum.
The director of a large hospital in the city had heard of the bread, and he wanted all the patients to eat the Mother’s delicious bread.
Normally Ollie’s mum wouldn’t accept such large orders because she couldn’t bake so many loaves at one time. But she felt very grateful when she heard the director’s plan to give the patients her bread. She was passionately motivated by his thinking and really wanted all the hospital patients to eat her bread.
The Mother started making bread from the day before the bread was to be delivered. Putting her prayers into each of them, she kneaded the loaves carefully one by one.
She put her heart into the work while imagining the smiles of the people who would eat it. By the time the last loaf was baked, the sun had begun to rise. She delivered the bread to the hospital without delay.

The patients report that the bread is delicious and immediately begin to feel better. And soon Litto is reaching out to all the humans and animals he has influenced, enlisting them in a communal project to relieve the suffering of people in lockdown by distributing loaves of Ollie’s mum’s bread.

Sadly I didn’t manage to try out the book with its intended readership. My three-year-old grandson lost interest after half a page (there are no trucks!), and the six-year-old is currently far too busy exercising her newly developed reading skills (mainly on the Billy B Brown books) to tolerate being read to, unless it’s Harry Potter.