The Tiny Bird & The Colors



The Tiny Bird & the Colors (ことりとりいろいろのいろ, Kotori Tori Iro'iro no Iro; lit. "birdie bird [and] various colors") is a book mentioned in the Black★Rock Shooter anime. The book is stated to be about "a bird that takes people to a world of different colors".

Description
In Mato's world, it was clearly popular enough to merit having more than one edition printed, also suggesting that it may be a very old book.

Mato is extremely fond of this book, to the point where she reads it over and over again and has a phone charm of the eponymous Tiny Bird. Yomi Takanashi also seems to be interested; she has a copy of the first edition, and drew a picture based off of a picture on the cover of the first edition to serve as her phone wallpaper. She later sends this picture to Mato.

The basic description is that the bird traveled to many different worlds and absorbed colors into its wings, such as "the blue of tears", "the pink of sneezes", and the "orange of smiles". However, it still wished to travel to new worlds, and it eventually absorbed so many colors that its wings became dull and black, dying in the end.

Contents

 * It seems that "The Tiny Bird & The Colors" only use phonetic writing system, hiragana, despite the fact that usually Japanese is written with ideographic kanji for concepts and hiragana only for grammar endings, particles etc. It can suggest that "The Tiny Bird & The Colors" may be adressed to little children who are still to learn kanji.
 * However, when Mato quickly writes "happier ending" in the book, she uses kanji for "white" (白, shiro) instead of its hiragana (しろ, shiro).
 * Colors mentioned in the book:
 * "Orange of Smiles" (えがおのオレンジ, egao no orenji)
 * "Pink of Sneezes" (かぜひきのピンク, kazehiki no pinku, lit. "pink of catching a cold")
 * "Blue of Tears" (なみだのあお, namida no ao)
 * It seems that "The Tiny Bird & The Colors" hasn't much text per page and is mostly picture-based, which also suggests that the book may be adressed to children. An example can be seen when Mato looks at the page describing Tiny Bird's wings turning black and the bird itself falling down. ""...her wings turned black and it fell""

- 「やがてつばさは、くろになって おちる、ことりとり」

Trivia

 * Yomi's phone wallpaper is avaliable for download in Goodsmile Company's mobile site, here.
 * Some of the colours described in the book, such as "blue of tears", the "orange of smiles", and the "red of anger" are the theme colors of the "other selves" which appear in the anime. However, "pink of sneezes" isn't one (though Chariot's land in the Otherworld is pink) and there are two anime "otherselves" theme colors which don't appear in the book: yellow and green.