The Yellow Book - A Friend Named Jacques Thibault

Published by Kodansha in 2002 and awarded the prestigious Tezuka Cultural Prize, Fumiko Takano's The Yellow Book is named after the longest of the four stories that it contains: a dramedy about a 1960s high school girl who falls in love with Roger Martin du Gard's French literary saga, Les Thibault. The remaining stories capture various fragments of modern everyday life with some tenderness and bittersweet humor. Through the kaleidoscope of its feminine views, The Yellow Book tries to put in the spotlight what, in sum, makes up life: the little (un)pleasant and overlooked things in our everyday routines.