A Hunger for Healing

 
Against a confectionary backdrop of—cue “My Favorite Things” instrumental—kimono embroidery, beribboned pigtails, rainbow nail polish, and squidgy Japanese rice cakes in cherry-blossom pink, matcha green, and peanutty yellow, The Mochi Makers, a new children’s picture book written and illustrated by Roseville resident Sharon Fujimoto-Johnson, depicts a sweet slice of Japanese American life. “I just really wanted to create a world that was joyful and safe and loving,” says Fujimoto-Johnson, 51. “In some ways, it was counter to the experience I was having with my health.” 

During the early days of the pandemic, the former scholarly journal editor was not only trying to recover from treatment for a rare form of cervical cancer, but also battling an unforeseen allergic reaction to the contrast dye used in CT scans, which triggered a total gut malfunction and the need to be fed intravenously for four and a half months. While bedridden for most of 2020, the Japanese American—who grew up between Yokohama, Japan, and the Napa Valley—took classes like “Drawing 1” and “Picture Book Wordsmith” at Storyteller Academy, an online school for creating children’s books founded by her friend, author and illustrator Arree Chung. Also as part of her convalescent curriculum, she attended webinars hosted by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.

“When you can’t eat or experience the sensations of eating, you think about food a lot,” says Fujimoto-Johnson, whose recuperation was a three-generation family affair: She and her husband Jeremy, a software engineer, their two school-age children, and her parents have lived under the same roof—perhaps prophetically, all things considered—since 2017. “This book came out of thinking about food, family and love, and where those intersect,” the author says.

Courtesy of Beach Lane Books; previous mochi image by Shutterstock AI.

Envisioning The Mochi Makers—which was published in March by Beach Lane Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster—Fujimoto-Johnson held in her mind’s eye all the times she watched her kids cook in the kitchen with their grandmother over this fateful cohabitation. Using an old family recipe, the story’s young protagonist, Emi—of the aforementioned beribboned pigtails and rainbow nail polish, as well as slight resemblance, says Fujimoto-Johnson, to her youngest child—makes the iconic Japanese rice cake known as mochi from scratch with her obaachan, or grandmother.

Among the mochi represented in the book, nary a painterly orb is loaded with ice cream, an American twist on the traditional Japanese foodway that Fujimoto-Johnson acknowledges in the epilogue as “the best-known type in the United States.” She honors customary varieties instead, like Osaka-style mochi wrapped in cherry blossom leaves, strawberry-stuffed bonbons, and the classic chalk-white rounds filled with red bean paste. While Emi and Obaachan gift these sweet treats to friends and family (actual names found within Fujimoto-Johnson’s inner circle are scrawled on the gift tags), they snack on a more savory alternative that’s pinched in dried seaweed and dipped in soy sauce. This less fussy iteration is—or rather, was—also preferred by the author.

“I actually can’t eat mochi anymore,” says Fujimoto-Johnson, wistfully. “My surgeon said I should never eat rice again. I literally laughed at him because it was such an absurd thing. I was like, ‘You’re telling me, a Japanese American woman, not to eat rice?’ And he said, ‘Your body can’t handle it. It’s sticky and hard to process.’ That was November 2020, and indeed I have not eaten rice since.” Instead, she subsists on a doctor-prescribed, low-fiber diet of only 10 or so foods, including fried potatoes, almond milk yogurt and sunny-side up eggs.

In The Mochi Makers, Emi and her grandmother bond over preparing the titular rice cakes together. (Courtesy of Beach Lane Books)

By design, The Mochi Makers  sees “very little action and zero drama,” says Fujimoto-Johnson. “My personal leaning is to create a serene moment.” She also embraced imperfection as stylistic element: “One of the things I kept hearing in my classes was that children respond to art that’s a little wonky. It gave me some courage. I can do wonky.” Adding dimension to the soft color palette and feathery strokes of her Apple Pencil, Fujimoto-Johnson applied digital collage. Images of actual heirloom textiles and old photos—from the kimono pattern superimposed on Emi’s shirt to the grainy pictures of family matriarchs, the original mochi makers—imbue the illustrations with lo-fi authenticity and fuzzy nostalgia. Lest any artful details go unnoticed, the large-format pages beg to be turned slowly.

Even the portrayal of the mochi-making process has a calming effect, thanks to soothing onomatopoeia, or literary ASMR. Steamed glutinous rice is pounded in modern fashion using a stand mixer (“Thonk, thonk”) rather than the wooden mallet of Obaachan’s sepia-toned youth (“Peh-ton, peh-ton”). Amid a cloud of potato starch, the characters shape small rice cakes (“Squish, squish,” “Pat, pat”).

Author-illustrator Sharon Fujimoto-Johnson in her Roseville home (Portrait by Britt Honey Photography, courtesy of Sharon FujImoto-Johnson)

Every syllable in the succinct story—which contains just 439 words, plus an epilogue that includes a simple mochi recipe—was deeply considered. “Is this the right word? That word—the sound is too short. I need a one-syllable word that’s a little bit longer,” recalls Fujimoto-Johnson of the rigorous editing process. “Picture books are almost like poetry.” Her penchant for the form may be hereditary since her grandmother wrote tankas, 31-syllable poems traditionally written as a single, unbroken line each. Next year, Fujimoto-Johnson will publish two poems in an anthology about the discriminatory internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

This painful era is also the subject of her second picture book, Shell Song  (set to be on shelves in April 2025 and available for preorder now), about her grandfather’s WWII incarceration at a Hawaii concentration camp for people of Japanese ancestry, proving that children’s picture books have a unique capacity to address adult-sized suffering: Maurice Sendak’s canonical Where the Wild Things Are  is encoded with his family’s Holocaust trauma, while Japanese American actor-activist George Takei’s genre debut, My Lost Freedom, is an auto-biographical account of his internment during WWII.

Fujimoto-Johnson correlates her own survival—so far, she’s gratefully “four years past treatment with no evidence of disease”—to the 28-month process of creating The Mochi Makers. “Every part of the world I built in the book, from the characters and their relationship to the colors, was such joyful work for me,” she says. “It gave me such respite and restoration.”

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