Eto Mori, a highly acclaimed children’s author, wrote the novel Colorful in 1998 and was met with much acclaim. Tackling the issue of teen suicide, it has been translated into seven languages and has sold over 1 million copies. It has been adapted into an anime and live-action film, stage play and manga. After 23 years, the book finally became available to an English-speaking audience in 2021 through the translation work of Jocelyne Allen.
A spirit wins a lottery in heaven that gives it a second chance at life. It has committed a grave error in its previous life and would normally be removed from the cycle of rebirth, but instead, it will be placed in a body to do a “homestay” and will be given a chance within the year for it to remember its previous life and its error. The spirit’s guide, an angel named Prapura, will assist when needed, depending on his mood.
The spirit is placed in the body of 14-year-old Makoto Kobayashi, a boy who had committed suicide by ingesting sleeping pills. Though his homestay family seems loving and supportive, the spirit soon finds out they are not the picture-perfect family. It also realizes Makoto has a low social status in school and, as a consequence, is teased and bullied. Though the spirit rebels against this image and manages to improve his social status, the family’s problems lead the spirit to find solace in the art room, where it discovers Makoto has a special talent for painting.
Though it despises Makoto’s family at first and is appalled by others Makoto had admired, the spirit discovers through its journey that everyone has their own problems they struggle with. “Anyone and everyone in this terrible world was broken in their own way,” it realizes. “Everyone’s got their own box of paints, and some of the colors are pretty and some are ugly.”
As it learns to look past people’s weaknesses and discrepancies, the spirit gains more compassion and understanding towards others, wishing it could relinquish its body so that Makoto himself could take another stab at life. As the father in the book points out during a father-son outing, “Just like how good things can’t last forever, the bad stuff doesn’t stick around that long, either.” As the spirit matures and remembers its past, it receives a pleasant surprise as it fully gains its second chance at life.
According to “Asahi Shimbun,” data released in 2023 by a Japanese government survey showed a record-breaking total of 514 school students aged 6-18 committed suicide in 2022. Since the survey first started in 1980, this was the first time the number has reached 500.
“Teenagers in Japan have such difficult lives, both now and twenty years ago, the time I first started thinking about this idea,” Eto Mori writes in the book’s afterward. “They stumble in the race to get the ‘right’ education, they’re crushed by friendships based on classroom hierarchies, they suffer from the excessive meddling or outright neglect of their parents—the list of issues they face is endless.”
Mori grappled with how to write a novel about suicide to an audience of young people who were already bogged down with their own problems. Though she considered writing the book using a realistic setting, she decided “to write about a serious subject with a comical touch” so that more people would be open to giving it a chance. “I think the issue of young people struggling and growing tired of the world before they have the chance to truly know it isn’t limited to Japan,” she wrote. “Neither is the draining fight against a closed-off society in which the air grows more stagnant with each passing year.”
Though it is a book aimed at adolescents, Colorful can also be an insightful book for adults, especially parents. Though readers may not be able to relate to everything spirit-Makoto experiences, the nuggets of wisdom found about life might either ring true or give hope. It is a reminder that life is always made better with people to help you through the way, whether it be friends, family, mentors, or acquaintances, and strength and inspiration can be found through the most unlikely sources. It is better to hope for the best and continue living rather than ending it all, especially at a young age.
