Tentacles and a Mullet: A Saki Tanaka Interview About the Ethereal BETWEEN WORDS

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending an American Librarian Association Annual Conference in none other than San Diego, California. It was my first trip to the region and I came away a big time fan. Who could resist it? The temperature. The sea. The fact that I got to watch crows and mockingbirds fighting in the streets like it happens every day. It was great!

Now at one point in the course of my travels I was explaining to an agent why it is that my librarians, when considering which of the hundreds and hundreds of children’s books to read for our best books committee, pay the most attention to Kirkus Reviews. I explained that Kirkus reviews come out the earliest, they focus on small publishers and books from overseas better than anyone else, and they give honest reviews. Like this one, for example: “Through powerful visual storytelling, this exquisite tale makes clear that words aren’t necessary to develop a truly lasting bond… A pitch-perfect tale for shy friend-makers everywhere.” That little starred review is linked to none other than the brand new picture book by Saki Tanaka, Between Words: A Friendship Tale. You might also describe it this way:

“Kai is used to following the seasons with Pa from place to new place where people speak languages unfamiliar to his ears. When they finally settle in a valley full of pools, Kai tries to invite the other children to join in his play, but the strangeness of his words drives them away. Frustrated, he kicks his most treasured stone into one of the pools and in his search for it, finds something even more valuable.

Dive into a whimsical tale of unexpected friendship, told with compassion and warmth.”

Today, now fully recovered from the conference experience, I am pleased to take some time to talk to Saki Tanaka about this book and its curious origins:

---

Betsy Bird: Saki! Thank you so much for talking with us today about BETWEEN WORDS! I know that you grew up moving around a lot as a kid, but can you tell us a little bit about that aspect of your own personal history, and how it inspired this picture book?

Saki Tanaka: Betsy! Thank YOU for this Q&A. I couldn’t be more excited to dive in!!

I grew up moving from country to country, raised by a Mexican mother and Japanese father. Being multiethnic and a perennial “foreigner” often made me feel out of place. In Japan, I looked the part but couldn’t speak the language, in Mexico I stuck out like a sore thumb even though I spoke Spanish fluently, then when my family moved to France I grappled with looking and sounding different! 

The memory at the heart of BETWEEN WORDS is of my first day at a school in France. I was feeling lost, standing alone on the playground surrounded by unfamiliar words, when I noticed a girl looking at me. She smiled, giving me the courage to wave at her—and she waved back! This wordless exchange opened the doors for me to find belonging, and is recreated beat by beat in the pages where Kai meets his first friend. The relief I felt urged me to share this courage with anyone who’s ever felt like an outsider or struggled to forge friendships. I also wanted to celebrate acts of kindness that help us embrace our differences and connect without a common language.

BB: So if you had to estimate, how much of BETWEEN WORDS is truly a depiction of your own personal story?

Saki: It’s 100% a depiction of little Saki’s struggles and triumphs as a third culture kid. It didn’t start out this way though, and took nearly a decade from idea to publication! The initial spark that got me writing was a radio story about the world’s deepest freshwater cave. It made me wonder what magical realms and creatures this pool concealed.

Around that time I also became intrigued by a friend’s insatiable need for travel, and started writing a story about a boy who was always looking toward new horizons. I tinkered with this manuscript for years, but it never quite clicked. It finally started to work when I realized that this was the opposite of my lived experience, and flipped the script to make it about a boy who yearns for belonging. 

At this point, I did wonder if I should make the protagonist a girl. The answer came to me when I heard a radio story about how male identifying humans (starting at a heartbreakingly young age) struggle to connect with each other and make friends. Hearing this convinced me to keep Kai a boy. Yay for radio!

BB: Yay indeed! Talk to us a little bit about the art in this book. Part of what I like about it so much is how it’s set in landscapes that will be unfamiliar to a lot of child readers themselves. It reminds me, in a way, of a younger version of Shaun Tan’s THE ARRIVAL. Where did you draw your inspiration for these locations?

Saki: THANK YOU. I spent an excessive amount of time developing these settings, so it’s incredibly gratifying that you noticed them (and were reminded of Shaun Tan’s inimitable work)! Every time my family moved to a new country, the unfamiliar sights and sounds evoked a mix of curiosity and anxiety for me. In an effort to simulate these feelings, I made the landscapes unrecognizable for readers by dreaming up various civilizations of an imagined anthropocene. Worldbuilding has been an obsession since childhood, so I had a field day with this. 

The thematic inspiration for these locations began with the line “For as long as he could remember, Kai had followed the seasons with Pa.” I was mulling over how I might show this passage of time when I rediscovered the Islamic proverb “many different flowers make a bouquet,” scribbled in my old journal. This gave me the idea to base the villages on flowers that represented autumn (kikyo/Japanese balloon flowers), winter (snowdrops), spring (cherry blossoms), and summer (hibiscus). 

In addition to the colors, textures and forms found in these flora and their native ecologies, I sourced inspiration from my Mexican and Japanese heritage. I loved finding unexpected similarities in the thatched houses that exist in both Yucatán and Ryukyuan building practices, as well as a shared craft of traditionally woven textiles and baskets. I fused these as sartorial and architectural details in the various cultures Kai encounters. When I showed my process book documenting these studies to the Scholastic team, I received the most beautiful sentiment from my creative director, Patti Ann Harris, who wondered if I might be nurturing future anthropologists!

BB: There’s also a lot of, what I can only describe as, magical realism to the images. From the tent that Kai and his Pa live in to the luminous, almost iridescent pools near their eventual home (they look like something out of Yellowstone National Park) to the sea creature he befriends. In the various drafts that you made of this book, was it always the plan to have this mixing and melding of fantasy and reality?

Saki: Blurring the lines between fantasy and reality was a part of BETWEEN WORDS from the get. And good eye! The pools are, indeed, partly inspired by the geothermal springs of Yellowstone National Park. I have a tendency to meld real-world inspiration with my imagination—a product of desperately wanting “magic” to be real. I was one of those kids who was always looking for portals into fantastical realms, spending hours writing and drawing them into existence. In a lot of ways, building worlds I could escape into was how I found belonging. Some could interpret that Kai is doing the same, imagining the encounter and world he finds inside the pool. I like to think his magical experience was real, though I’ll leave that up to the reader to decide.

BB: Reviewers have called the friend Kai makes in the sea a “mermaid”, but to my mind it’s almost more interesting than that. The tail, for example, looks more octopus or squid inspired than fishy. How did you come up with the look of this friend for the book?

Saki: I love that you saw this. Keen-eyed kiddos have also pointed this out, asking if this being is a “seahorse or octopus person.” This delights me because I studied footage of these animals’ movements for reference. I wanted Kai’s friend to feel ethereal and otherworldly—perhaps subliminally conjuring an image of someone who’s “out of place” in the best way possible. She went through various permutations and ultimately landed on a form inspired by the aforementioned animals and sea anemones, a species classified as both animal and plant. 

BB: Oh, I love that. Both animal and plant. Beautiful. You know, it took a second or third read before I realized that the moment Kai drops into the sea and meets his new friend, the words of the text disappear entirely. It essentially becomes a wordless book for a little while. It’s a clever way to bypass the language barrier too. Did you always plan to cut the language out of this part of the book? Why, to your mind, do you think it works?

Saki: How better to impart the wonders of wordless communication than with wordless pages in an otherwise worded book (say that ten times fast)? The medium becomes the message! I love how the underwater illustrations carry the plot alone for a while, nonverbally sharing the universal languages of connection I used as a kid to make friends: playing, laughing, and building together without any words. 

I’d initially gone back and forth between adding text to these underwater scenes or keeping it textless as a purely stylistic choice. It was one of my editors, the amazing Kait Feldmann, who pointed out that it made more sense to go wordless so that readers could experience these scenes the same way Kai and his friend were (without the ability or need to use words). It was a brain explosion moment that I’ll forever be grateful for, because it seems to be resonating with readers who love how the book uses both worded and wordless pages to viscerally bring this point home.

BB: BETWEEN WORDS already has a Kirkus star, and maybe more accolades on top of that. Where do you go from here now? What’s next for you?

Saki: DAW SHUCKS. Thanks for this kind comment, Betsy. And thank you for your thoughtful questions that made my soul feel deeply seen! I just finished final art for my second picture book, NIMBUS PLAYS ALONE, about an introverted rain cloud who navigates letting others in while remaining true to themselves. Now that that’s wrapped, I’ve turned my attention to my next picture books which have happily found an amazing new home; one is about my grandmother who nurtured my love of reading (with a whimsical twist of its own, of course), and another that we’re discussing that might be based on a Japanese mythical creature that I’ve been working on since before BETWEEN WORDS. Whenever I can, I also tinker with my middle grade sci fi/fantasy graphic novel that explores the nature of time and relativity. Here’s hoping I have enough lifetimes to bring these into the world!

BB: Introverted rain clouds are my favorite kinds of rain clouds. Thanks so much for the peek into the future!

---

I’d like to offer big thanks to Saki for taking the time to answer my questions today. I am happy to report that Between Words: A Friendship Tale is in bookstores and libraries right now, as we speak. Run on out and grab yourself a copy if you have a yen.

Filed under: Interviews