Most of you come to My Cat Portal for tabletop RPGs, but today I want to tell you about the most personal book we have ever published.
The Kickstarter for Hi-chan no Monogatari is over, and fulfillment is complete. From the start, we knew an English and Italian edition would never repeat the book's Japanese numbers overnight. The story is too unusual to explain in a single sentence, and it asks many Western readers to approach manga in a different way.
The campaign reached its goal. More importantly, the people who read the book loved it. The story crossed the language barrier just fine.
The difficult part has always been answering one apparently easy question.
What kind of manga is this?
The joke that became a publishing deal
My wife discovered Ayaka Takeuchi's manga on Instagram and was so struck by it that she had to tell me about it.
At the time, I couldn't read the whole thing myself. My Japanese is good enough to get me into situations and nowhere near good enough to carry me through a book like this. Still, I was curious. Half joking, I asked my wife to write to Takeuchi-san and see whether she might let us publish the manga in English and Italian.
Ayaka was thrilled by the idea. She later drew a short manga on how our collaboration began.
Things moved surprisingly fast after that. We contacted her Japanese publisher, Asuka Shinsha, and acquired the rights. The original title is おかあさん、お空のセカイのはなしをしてあげる！胎内記憶ガールの日常, or roughly, Mom, I'll Tell You About the World in the Sky! The Daily Life of a Girl with Prenatal Memories. We called our edition Hi-chan no Monogatari: A Manga Tale of My Daughter's Prenatal Memories.
When I finally received a translation I could read, I cried like an idiot.
Then I laughed out loud. A few pages later, I was crying again.
I read manga constantly, usually a couple of books a day. When you read that much, you start to recognize the machinery. You know the familiar character roles. You can often feel an emotional beat approaching before it arrives. That familiarity changes how a story reaches you. Part of your brain has learned how the pieces work.
Hi-chan no Monogatari got past that part of my brain.
Hi-chan’s story
When Ayaka's daughter Hi-chan was about three years old, she began talking about memories from inside her mother's womb. She also remembered a place that came before it, which she called the "World in the Sky".
She spoke about babies waiting there until it was time to come to Earth. She described rainbow slides that carried them into their mothers' tummies. Each baby packed snacks for the trip, an oddly serious detail that becomes unbearably cute once you know the whole story. Gods watched over them and sometimes healed them when something went wrong.
At first, Ayaka and her husband treated these stories as the wonderful nonsense of a small child. Then Hi-chan began saying things she should have had no way to know. She spoke about Ayaka's miscarriage and described the arrival of her sisters with startling certainty. Most of her strange little predictions came true.
Ayaka did something simple. She listened.
She began drawing the stories quickly, sometimes while Hi-chan was still talking, so the moment wouldn't disappear. She posted some of those sketches on Instagram as a record of family life. Almost overnight, the story went viral. Other parents wrote to say their children had told them similar things. Readers who had experienced miscarriage said the pages helped them breathe around their grief.
Asuka Shinsha published the book in Japan, where it went on to sell almost 100,000 copies. A family conversation that could have vanished before bedtime had reached readers across the country. Ayaka and her family were invited onto national television to talk about it.
You can see the reaction for yourself in the reviews on Amazon Japan. The book has received more than 1,500 five-star reviews. Many readers describe finding it after a miscarriage. Others say that it made them cry and left them more grateful to be alive.
I understand why.
The book never lectures you about what to believe. Ayaka is open about her own doubts. She records what her daughter said, along with her reactions as a mother trying to make sense of it. The result can be absurdly funny. It can also reach a place that ordinary explanations rarely touch.
I don't consider myself spiritual, and I am even less religious. I believe Hi-chan is a brilliant child with a fierce imagination. Ayaka tells her family's story with honesty and leaves readers free to decide what they make of it.
The manga comforts me anyway.
Art can do that. It can give grief a gentler shape.
The art Ayaka chose for this story
Ayaka's skill was never in question for me. Her published work already proves it. Seeing her draw in person only made that clearer. She has the kind of control that makes difficult work look effortless.
For Hi-chan no Monogatari, she chose a minimal and highly stylized visual language. The artwork is clean and extremely expressive. Its apparent simplicity lets every reaction land immediately.
The restraint is what makes the drawings so effective. A raised eyebrow or a tiny change in posture can carry an entire joke. When the story turns painful, the same economy keeps it honest. Nothing is overplayed.
Then there are the eyes.
Many of the characters have a gaze that feels slightly otherworldly. They look like souls moving through temporary bodies. Ayaka herself is drawn with more recognizably human eyes in only a few scenes.
The title means Hi-chan's Story. Ayaka is the one holding the pen, and that changes everything. We experience Hi-chan's memories through a woman who has lived through miscarriage and balances motherhood with her work as a professional manga artist. The true protagonist is Ayaka herself. Hi-chan's memories become a window into Ayaka's inner life. She writes about her own thoughts and feelings with unflinching honesty.
The wild comedy belongs to that point of view. So does the pain.
Why Japan understood it immediately
Japanese readers tend to treat manga as a medium broad enough to hold almost any kind of story. It can carry fantasy or autobiography. It can record a family conversation. The subject decides what the drawings need to do.
Western readers often meet manga through a narrower door. Many expect a familiar visual language and a clear genre. A minimal style can be mistaken for limited technique, or taken as a sign that the book was made for children.
We even changed the cover art for our edition because the original Japanese cover gave that impression in the West. A new cover could only solve part of the problem.
At first, we planned to call the English edition The Rainbow Slide, which was actually the title Ayaka had originally wanted for the book. In the end, we chose a more descriptive title because Western readers needed a clearer idea of what kind of story they were picking up.
The usual labels do not help much. The phrase a story about prenatal memories makes it sound like a “spiritual” book. The parenting shelf suggests it is aimed only at mothers.
Make no mistake: this is a book about family and loss, written for adult readers. It asks what stories can do when facts offer no comfort. It is also very, very funny.
Working with Ayaka brought her into our lives. Over time, our working relationship grew into a close friendship. Visiting her family has become part of every trip we make to Japan.
Seeing them now reminds me how much time has passed. Hi-chan, of course, isn't her real name. It's the name she has in the manga, where she will always be a little girl explaining the universe to her parents. In real life, she's much older now, and so are our children. They're all slowly becoming their own people. It feels like yesterday that Ayaka and us began working on this project. Watching them grow makes me proud, and it makes me miss the little kids they used to be. That feeling always takes me back to one scene in the manga, and to an answer from Hi-chan that still gets me every single time.
Spoiler Alert There’s something here that still destroys me Open this if you want to read the scene.
The following section discusses one scene from the manga. Skip it if you would rather discover everything on the page.
Hi-chan explains that some babies in the World in the Sky become too impatient to wait for their turn to be born. They go down the slide before they are ready. Sometimes a baby gets hurt. Occasionally, one gets hurt very badly. When the gods reach them in time, they try to heal them.
Ayaka asks why a baby would take that risk.
Hi-chan answers at once: "Because they want to be hugged. Every baby wants to be held."
She then tells the story of a baby who went down too soon and returned to the sky shortly afterward. The other babies saw the soul rising back toward them and asked what it had been like down there.
The baby was delighted.
"It was wonderful. It was worth it. I recommend it!"
That thought destroys me every time.
I can't help thinking about children who come into this world without the care every child deserves. Some have to learn how to survive before they have had time to be children. After all the effort it took to be born, perhaps they came for one chance to be held.
Give me a second. I need to wipe my eyes.
Okay. I'm back.
I return to this scene often because it has an extraordinary healing power. To me, the World in the Sky comes from the astonishing imagination of a brilliant child. The comfort it gives me is real.
We all need affection. The world would be kinder if we gave more of it away, freely and without conditions.
Why Ayaka keeps telling this story
The book's final idea is simple. I will leave most of it on the page, where it belongs.
You are alive, and your time here is brief. Enjoy every minute you can.
Maybe we chose this life. Maybe some tired god shoved us off a cloud because we were wasting eternity. Either way, we have landed. We might as well take what is good and do our best to be happy while we can.
The word readers use most often is healing. I understand why. It is also why I want as many people as possible to read this manga. Ayaka has carried the same wish from the beginning. Once you reach the end of the manga, you will understand exactly why sharing Hi-chan's story matters so much to her.
You can read the first three chapters free and find the complete manga here.
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