Sakura Momoko: How the daughter of greengrocer’s couple created one of the most iconic characters in the world?
It was a hot summer that year, and Momoko had woken up from her third nap. This time, she woke up without her mother’s scoldings to stop being lazy and start working on her summer homework. The phone rang, and as it did not seem that anyone was going to answer it, she dragged herself, with half-closed eyes, to the corridor where the Sakura family decided it was the best spot for a telephone to be, and answered:
“Moshi Moshi, Sakura desu.”
The voice on the other line came soft and familiar:
“Maruko-chan? Tama desu.”
Momoko’s tone changed and got more chipper as she started to recognize her best friend’s voice and replied:
“Tama-chan! Konnichiwa! O-hisashiburi! Genki?!”
Tama responded with the same enthusiasm, with regular, casual greetings, before she asked Maruko if she was up to go swimming in the neighborhood pool today. Maruko, without hesitation, agreed—forgetting all about the piles of homework sitting on her desk since the beginning of summer. She ran to her room to get ready and tiptoed to sneak out of the house before Okasan noticed.
Sakura Momoko was the second daughter of a greengrocer’s couple living in Shizuoka Prefecture, in a town called Shimizu (Pure Water). She lived with her older sister, her parents, and both of her paternal grandparents—a quiet and normal life back in the sixties.
She was fond of drawing, animals, and plants, and had set her mind on becoming a mangaka early in her life. Her mother’s constant lecturing did not change her carefree habits—doing everything at her own pace, doing nothing but what she liked, and unable to bring herself to do what she didn’t, like finishing homework that mostly could have been done within an hour of full attention.
Anyone who followed the story of Sakura Momoko through her creation, Chibi Maruko-chan, which was first released in Japan in 1986, will know that Momoko put most of herself into it—not feeling ashamed of her family members, their humble dwellings and means of living, and not feeling the need to portray herself as anything other than what she believed to be true about herself.
The mangaka left the world early in her fifties after fighting cancer in 2018, but she left a legacy that no one can take away from her. She left her young self on people’s screens, playing and replaying for decades, to tell the story of a kid who only wanted to spend her summer reading manga, sleeping, and watching some television—and most importantly, finding a way to avoid doing her homework by any means possible.
つづく。。。
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