The current No. 1 best seller in Japan is the cheery picture book "Sekai ga moshi hyakunin no mura dattara" ("If the World Were a Village of 100 People"; Magazine House), a retelling of a bit of "Netlore." Several years ago, the environmentalist Donella Meadows wrote a newspaper column on the global division and consumption of resources, using a village of 1,000 people to represent the world's population of some 6 billion. Her piece struck a chord and in the course of being forwarded from person to person on the Internet, the analogy was simplified to 100 people.

Now this Internet text has been reworked into Japanese by Kayoko Ikeda, with an English translation by C. Douglas Lummis. Done in picture-book format, with 14 full pages of childlike color illustrations, each of the 30 pages of main text consists of a sentence or two in both Japanese and English.

After detailing the unfortunate plight of much of the world's population ("20 are undernourished, one is dying of starvation"; "17 have no clean, safe water to drink"; "one has a college education, two have computers, 14 cannot read"), the book rather perversely ends on a note of celebration, urging one to be grateful for being so well-off oneself: "So sing from the bottom of your heart, dance with your body waving free, and live, putting your soul into it. And when you love, love as though you have never been wounded, even if you have."