Happy New Year everyone. Today is January 2, 2026. As I begin this new year, I found myself doing some digital spring cleaning and opened a dusty old hard drive that has been sitting in my drawer for ages. As the disk began to spin with its familiar, faint hum, it felt like I was opening a time capsule from a completely different life. Amidst the sea of disordered folders, I found them again—a series of illustrations by the Japanese artist Sai Tamiya.
It was back in 2009 when I first encountered these images on an internet forum. The artwork tells a simple but devastatingly beautiful story of a cat’s entire life. It starts with a tiny ball of fur arriving in a child’s world, follows their shared moments of growing up together, and ends with that quiet, inevitable departure as the child becomes an adult and the cat’s time finally runs out.
In 2009, these drawings moved me to tears because I had a cat of my own back then. Her name was Bibi. She was a gentle soul, and her rhythmic breathing and soft purrs were the background music of my daily life. Today, as I look at these files again, I realized with a heavy heart that I no longer have any photos of her. Those digital fragments of her physical self have been lost to time. Yet, looking at Sai Tamiya’s illustrations, I feel Bibi’s presence more strongly than ever. The cat in the drawings followed the same path Bibi did—staying by my side until she eventually had to leave for a place I couldn’t follow.
Revisiting these works in 2026, I feel a profound sense of nostalgia, not just for Bibi, but for the era itself. We live in a time now where AI can generate a thousand perfect images of cats in seconds, but there is something hollow in that perfection. Sai Tamiya’s work belongs to a “naive” age—a time when human illustrators breathed life into every stroke with their own hands. Her signature translucency and those delicate, fragile lines weren’t the result of a prompt or an algorithm. They were a reflection of a human soul contemplating life, growth, and the pain of saying goodbye.
In that era, every piece of art that moved us was tethered to a real person who might have felt the same grief or loved a creature just like Bibi. AI can simulate the look of a watercolor wash, but it can never understand the weight of a memory or the ache of a silent house. There is a warmth in those hand-drawn days that feels increasingly precious now.
Thank you, Sai Tamiya, for that gift of gentleness you gave me in 2009. And thank you, Bibi. Even without a photo, you are still here, living within the colors that never fade. May 2026 be a year where we all hold onto the things that are real, human, and irreplaceable.
