In 1981, Japanese actress and television personality Tetsuko Kuroyanagi published a best-selling memoir, Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window, an engaging story set during her unusual primary school years that happened to take place during World War II. Her book sold 4.5 million copies in Japan in just its first year and has been translated into thirty languages, eleven from India alone. The book tells of Kuroyanagi’s rambunctious childhood that got her expelled from her first school, partly because she refused to sit at her desk and instead wanted to look out the window at the sparrows outside.
Kuroyanagi’s parents found her a new, innovative school—Tomoe Gakuen—that used old train cars as classrooms. The school was founded by Sosaku Kobayashi in 1937 after he traveled around Europe in the early 1930s to look at primary schools there. His school catered to curious children who didn’t conform to social norms, as well as students with physical disabilities. In 1945, the school was destroyed by a bomb dropped by the US military.
Kuroyanagi—who went by the nickname Totto-chan because she couldn’t pronounce Tetsuko when she was young and thought the honorific -chan was part of her name—returns after forty years with a sequel, translated by Yuki Tejima. Although both are written in the third person, this new book reads more like a traditional autobiography than the original Totto-chan. There is background information on Totto-chan’s family before she started at Tomoe Gakuen and what happened to her family and her after her school was bombed. While the first book is a lighthearted account of an independent little girl who defies societal norms, the sequel takes a more sobering look at war and how it affects families.
The year before Totto-chan’s school was bombed, her family suffered a great loss when her younger brother Meiji died from sepsis. Totto’s other younger brother Noriaki and younger sister Mari, who didn’t feature much in the first book, are present throughout most of the sequel. The same year Meiji died, Totto’s father—an accomplished violinist and concertmaster of the New Symphony Orchestra, the predecessor of the NHK Symphony Orchestra—was drafted into the Japanese army. Although he had so far been able to avoid military service in the past, this luck had now run out. Totto and her family attended his send-off ceremony.
Totto had never before seen her father surrounded by so many people without a violin in hand. But while the war appeared to be worsening, nobody knew the true severity of the situation, so the mood was not one of great despair. That, at least, was a small blessing.
Totto, her mother, and her younger siblings survived the Great Tokyo Air Raid that killed close to 100,000 people in one night. This raid also destroyed her school. To stay safe, Totto’s mother took her three children on a long train ride to Aomori Prefecture, where she found work on a farm cooperative. But life wasn’t easy for Totto in her new environment.
Early on in their life in Aomori, Totto broke out in boils all over her body as a result of malnutrition from having subsisted almost entirely on kelp noodles. She was also hurting from paronychia, a purulent infection of the fingers and toes caused by bacteria that attack the cuticles and nail folds…Totto gritted her teeth and tried to bear the boils and the pulsing pain of the nail infection… medicine was impossible to come by due to the war… a fact of life for everybody.
When she was well, Totto attended a new school and learned the Aomori dialect, but her classroom experience seemed almost drab in comparison to her time at Tomoe Gakuen. Soon the war ended and the family learned through a newspaper headline that Totto’s famous concertmaster father had survived.
The second half of the book tells of Totto’s return with her family to Tokyo, where they reunited with her father. She attended a Catholic school and later enrolled at the Tokyo College of Music to study Western opera. As a young adult, Totto got into television acting, which contributed to the popularity of her first book because she was already so well-known in Japan; readers in other countries where it was translated also enjoyed Totto’s quirky character and her refusal to conform.
The sequel draws attention back to a timeless classic. While it doesn’t have the unique tone of the first book, because Kuroyanagi just turned 92, this might be her fans’ last chance to hear more about her life after she left Tomoe Gakuen and how she became a television star. Readers new to Kuroyanagi’s story should begin with her charming first book.