Yoko Sano (1938–2010) was a Japanese picture-book creator and essayist born in Beijing. After graduating from the design department of Musashino Art University, she studied lithography in Berlin. Her work encompassed picture books, children’s stories, essays, illustration, and the translation of foreign picture books, and she received Japan’s Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2003. Her representative work, "The Cat That Lived a Million Times," follows a tiger cat who is reborn a million times as the pet of different owners but never loves any of them. After becoming a free stray, he meets a white cat, builds a family, and cares for someone other than himself for the first time. When she dies, he weeps for the first time and, after that final life, is never reborn.