Grick's Adventure

I wrote about The Adventurers (冒険者たち, 1972) by  斎藤惇夫 (SAITOU Atsuo) a while back. グリックの冒険 (Gurikku no bouken, Grick's Adventure,  1970) was the first book written in the series; but The Adventurers was written as a prequel as an origin story for a minor character in Grick's Adventure, the rat Ganba. The hero of Grick's Adventure is a chipmunk, Grick. According to Saitou's afterword, the name is meant to recall the sound of a chipmunk eating a nut and the German word Glück (fortune, happiness).

As the story starts Grick is one of two pet chipmunks in a city house. He and his elder sister Frack are kept in a cage most of the day, but let out for an hour to play in a room of their owner's house. For Frack her present state is a relief after the cramped pet shop she had known before; but the more energetic Grick has no memories of the pet shop and feels confined. From time to time the chipmunks get out into other parts of the house, and on one such occasion Grick meets a pigeon, Pippō, who tells him that he doesn't belong in the house, he should be outside; Grick's real home is a forest Pippō had visited in the north, filled with chipmunks. In the days that follow, Grick cannot stop thinking of this forest.

In a voice just short of crying, he interrupted Pippō. 'I want to go there too,' he shouted.
'Eh? To the forest?' Pippō stared astonished at Grick. 
'Yes. I want to go. To the forest. To where I there are other chipmunks like me.' ...
Pippō looked at Grick for a while, then said, 'Well, if you had wings, you know? I reckon walking all that way would be incredibly difficult. It's a huge distance. Just flying there and back leaves me quite exhausted. It's hopeless.  Firstly, you can't even get out of his town ... And suppose for the sake of argument (that's just supposing, mind you), suppose you manage to get out of the town, there's fields going on for ever, after them a hill. I call it a hill, but it's pretty high. Then more fields, then there's a big river flowing. Mmm, that river, right, it's fed by all the small rivers. That river goes down to the sea. Then the coast keeps going northward and there's a mountain. Cross that mountain and you come to your home. It's hopeless. Really it's hopeless.'
'But didn't you tell me to leave here?' Grick said, his eyes filled with tears.
'I did. But I meant you should find some garden near here.' Pippō answered, looking apologetically at Grick.
'I'm not going out to live in a garden. How much different is that to the parlour? Where I want to go is my real home. If I can't, I .....' 

For the most part, Grick's adventure is a kind of animal odyssey. The first part of the journey, however, has a different character. Grick meets the brown rat Ganba, who with his companions is helping in a war against the black rats. Frankly, this makes uncomfortable reading. At best, you could say it resembles a turf war. But when the leader of the town's brown rats is making demagogic speeches against the black rats, and the brown rats are hunting through the town to find where the black rats are hiding from them, to kill them or drive them out of town, it basically reads like a story of ethnic cleansing. The episode ends inconclusively (it is not after all Grick's story); and, Saitou does make it clear enough that the black rats would have a different view of the story to the one that we get following Ganba. Still you have to wonder what children are supposed to make of it all.

After this, the narrative is more straightforward. The various stages that Pippō describes in the quotation above make up the stages of the book. First however, Grick acquires a companion, Nonnon, a female squirrel with a wounded leg who follows him from a zoo on the outskirts of town where he stays for a while. At first, Grick resents her, but he comes to recognise that he might never have left the zoo without her prompting. 

The story is mostly episodic, with various dangers from predators or hunger  appearing at intervals. Running through the various adventures is awareness of the passing year and the approach of winter, making any delay a new kind of danger. 

  As I mentioned in my earlier post, the book was made into an anime film with the same title in 1981, released in English as Enchanted Journey.
  

The Adventurers

1972 was the year that  Watership Down by Richard Adams was published. I remember how, once it came out in paperback, almost everyone seemed to be reading it. In Japan another animal adventure story came out in the same year, and was likewise very successful:  冒険者たち ガンバと15ひきの仲間 (Boukenshatachi ganba to 15hiki no nakama The Adventurers, Gamba and his Fifteen Companions) by  斎藤惇夫 (SAITOU Atsuo, born 1940) with illustrations by 薮内正幸 (YABUUCHI Masayuki, born 1940). The book is a prequel to Saitou's first book, グリックの冒険 (Gurikku no bouken, Grick's Adventure,  1970). I haven't read it; but apparently its main character is a Japanese chipmunk, Grick. A minor character in the book, the rat Gamba, was so popular that Saitou decided to make him the main character in his next book. There's also a sequel, ガンバとカワウソの冒険 (Ganba to kawauso no bouken, The Adventure of Gamba and the Otter, 1983). The Adventurers was made into an anime series, ガンバの冒険 (Ganba no bouken, The Adventures of Gamba, 1975), and then into a film, as were the other two books in the series (グリックの冒険, released as Enchanted Journey,  1981; 冒険者たち ガンバと7匹のなかま, 1984; ガンバとカワウソの冒険 1991).

Gamba's name is short for Ganbariya, "Battler"; but at the start of the story his fighting spirit is only shown in taking food from the larders of houses that other rats have occupied and keeping them out of his (the other rats think "Thief" or "Robber" would be a better name, but since Ganba is stronger than them, they don't press the point). He is taken out of his dull but easy life by his friend Manpuku, "Fullbelly", who wants to go visit the sea (and taste the imported delicacies to be found in the harbour). At a party in a dockside warehouse, Gamba drinks, fights, dances and brags with the ship and harbour rats who are enjoying the warehouse goods. Suddenly the party is interrupted by the appearance of a hungry and terribly wounded rat, Chuuta, who has escaped from an island where a large group of weasels has almost wiped out the rats living there. He is looking for help to save his family. One rat had already experienced the peculiar terror of these weasels, the Noroi clan, led by the charismatic and terrifying white weasel, Noroi. Despite his warning that the fight is hopeless, Gamba and fourteen others set off to fight the weasels.

Children need role models

Animal wars have often featured in children's books, for instance in Richard Jefferies' Wood Magic (1881) and Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908). In Japan, こがね丸 (Koganemaru, 1891) often said to be the first children's story, tells of a dog avenging his father's death; and INUI Tomiko wrote several children's books with animal heroes, such as  ながいながいペンギンの話 (A Long, Long Penguin Story, 1957). I haven't read Koganemaru; but of the books I have read, the most similar is probably Watership Down. Common points are the distinctly adult protagonists and the epic scale. In Watership Down that is achieved by Tolkien style world building, with an invented mythology as background and a foundation legend based on the Aeneid and the legend of Romulus. The Adventurers feels like it is looking more towards samurai films for its model. In particular the reader is almost inevitably reminded of the plot of Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai. Like in Kurosawa's samurai films, the action is short but intense, and much of the drama comes from eloquent speeches in debates of the heroes.

The actual fight with the weasels starts in the last third of the book. But the journey to the island and the search for the survivors is itself full of adventure; and Saitou very effectively builds up our dread of the weasels. He also very skillfully deploys his large cast. It helps that a few are only characterised by one capability revealed in the name (e. g. Tenor, Bass, Jump, Holedigger); but he manages to make us feel like we know a surprising number of characters and to give many of them a personal story that interacts with the larger story. Early in the book we are given warning that not all the companions will survive.

One other aspect the book shares with Watership Down is that it is a distinctly masculine story. All the fifteen companions are male; and Gamba shows an expectation that even in a fight for survival, it is only the males that will be fighting. At least the one named female character, Shouji, shows some impatience with this attitude. As in other Japanese children's books that I have read, the hero is boastful (in a positive way) and not very introspective, except towards the end of the book as the burdens of his responsibility start to weigh on him.

There is no English translation, but it seems to have been translated into French by Karine Chesneau: Gamba et les rats aventuriers (2012).