窓ぎわのトットちゃん

This is an autobiographical memoir written in 1981 by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, an actress, TV personality, and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. It recalls her time attending an unconventional and progressive elementary school as a little girl in the early years of WWII.

Totto-chan is sent to this odd school because she has been expelled. From the first grade. Nowadays such a child would probably be referred for ADHD testing, but in WWII Japan she was simply expelled from first grade, and in desperation her mother brings her to an experimental school housed in a collection of old train cars. The student body is unusually diverse and includes children with disabilities which mainstream schools of the time were not set up to handle. Everything at this school, from lessons to meals to sports day, is done differently, with an eye toward making all of the children feel welcomed and included.

The sentences in this can be a bit on the long side, but they’re written with an abundance of commas to mark off phrase chunks. For example, here’s a medium sentence:
運んできたお兄さん達は、太い丸太を、何本も電車の下に敷いて、少しずつ、その上を、ころがすようにして、電車を、トラクターから、校庭へとおろしていった。
Depending on where you are in Japanese studies, this might make it easier or harder to read.

I didn’t finish this book. It’s a longtime bestseller so clearly many people have loved it, but I just didn’t get into it. When I’m reading (slowly) in Japanese, I prefer books which are faster paced to help pull me along. This seems a sweet story and I actually feel bad that I didn’t finish it, but reading as a language student is hard enough that it helps to have some cheap and easy rewards, and this isn’t that sort of book.