This year, the bestselling book in Japan wasn’t about kimono-clad demon slayers or quiet architecture mysteries — it was about children making mistakes. “,” from the illustrated series by Noritake Suzuki about a cloddish kid forever falling into mishaps or “big pinches,” was the top-selling book of 2025.
In the latest edition, published April this year, the clumsy schoolboy with a bowl haircut and cowlick runs into familiar foibles of childhood, such as “broke disposable chopsticks unevenly” and “left water bottle outside during recess,” which are ranked relatively low on the spectrum of hiccups. Bigger crises include “umbrella gets stuck inside out” and “cat follows you home.”
In each book, Suzuki assigns “data” in the style of ubiquitous Japanese product rankings to each problem. Book 1 puts “ice cream starts melting” as a level 20 pinch, out of 100, with its likelihood at 5 out of 5 stars. “While riding in the car you see a huge spider” is a much bigger problem (level 68), but far less likely (1 star).
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