When she turns twelve, Tomoko, fatherless, will have to change cities and separate from her mother to go to study first in high school. To do this, he will go to live with his cousin Mina, a luxurious Western-style mansion near Kobe, where everything is singularly different: his cousin spends the day between books, or playing with matches, his uncle (director of a well-known beverage factory) is mixed-race and is mysteriously absent from home, and his great-aunt Rosa is German and barely speaks Japanese. But, above all, on the farm (which in her time had housed a zoo) lives a dwarf hippopotamus, which Mina uses as a means of transportation to go to primary school, due to the chronic asthma that afflicts her. This novel (Tanizaki Award 2006), full of magical optimism and poetry, set in the 70s, is part of the cycle dedicated to friendship and childhood initiated by Yoko Ogawa (the best-known Japanese novelist in her country and abroad). Japan) with The Teacher's Favorite Formula, an international bestseller, which sold more than two million copies in Japan alone.