Book Review: The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park by Michiko Aoyama

Have y’all heard of this new genre known as Japanese Cozy Fiction yet? It’s fairly new to me, so I dove in with the short and sweet novel The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park by Michiko Aoyama, translated from the Japanese by Takami Nieda. I love a cozy mystery,
so I felt as though crossing over into Japanese cozy fiction would be a reasonable next step. And although I didn’t find anything wrong with this first attempt, I can’t see myself eagerly seeking out other books like this regularly. Despite this lukewarm reaction, I am
reading a few more for my upcoming CBC segment so you’ll see some more book reviews like this one over the next few weeks. Let’s see how different they are!

Plot Summary
There are five distinct sections of this book, each focusing on a separate character and written from their first person perspective. Each person lives in the same apartment building close to Hinode Park which includes a small children’s playground with a special reputation; within it is an old piece of equipment, a weathered ride-on hippo known as Kabahiko. Local legend claims that if someone is suffering from an ailment (mental or physical) they simply need to rub the corresponding part of Kabahiko where they feel pain, and he will heal them. Each character is battling with a different yet innter conflict; Kanato is struggling to bring up her school grades, Sawa feels like an outcast among her parent group, Chiharu suffers from a rare hearing loss in young people, Yuya fakes an injury to escape a school yard humiliation and Kazuhiko is unable to connect meaningfully with his own mother. Yet once they meet Kabahiko and touch its painted body, their lives begin to improve. It’s never established as to whether the hippo is actually magic, but somehow its comforting presence restores a sense of peace to each person’s life.

My Thoughts
Reading a book like this requires a certain suspension of disbelief. Each character’s situation is quite different, yet their voices sound quite similar. For instance, a young boy says the following line:

“It’s like what the old lady at Sunrise Cleaning had said: we’d only been alive for ten years, and there was so much we didn’t know. From here on out, we would probably face all kinds of challenges and feel all sorts of emotions” (p. 184 of The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park by Michiko Aoyama, ARC edition).

Of course not many ten year olds talk like this, but instead of labelling this bad writing, I’ll simply point out that the intention of the book is not realism, it’s messaging. We are meant to be reading these books to feel better about ourselves, and life in general – not for an honest portrayal of human nature.

What else gives me the warm and fuzzies? Speaking as a cat-lover, I’ve noticed that many of these cozy fictions feature cats, either in the narrative, title, or cover, which I am (naturally) all in favour of. Even though cats don’t play a large role in this book, they do make their appearances, and in one particular scene a grown man is pushed to an outburst of anger when his aging mother mocks his pet cat. It is most definitely an overreaction, but animals are treated with a kind of reverence in this book that you wouldn’t often find elsewhere. Perhaps this is a trait of the Japanese culture that I’m not familiar with? If so, I’m definitely a fan, and I definitely noticed it in this novel.

So will you come to any great epiphanies while reading this book? Probably not. It’s a fairly short and accessible read that offers platitudes we’ve all heard before, but it will make you feel warm and cozy, and sometimes that’s all we need in a book.