Seven Days' Ransom

七日間の身代金 (Nanokakan no minoshirokin, Seven Days' Ransom, 1986) is an impossible crime puzzle by 岡嶋二人 (OKAJIMA Futari). A little late, I've added "impossible crime" to the blog's post labels. Japanese detective stories often use "locked room" to describe impossible crimes which don't involve a locked room, or sometimes even a room.

CHIKAISHI Chiaki (近石千秋) and TSUKISHIRO Younosuke (槻代要之助) are a musical duo. Chiaki writes the lyrics, Younosuke sets them to music, then Chiaki sings the songs accompanied by Younosuke on piano. The two of them are in their mid to late twenties, hoping to get a start in the music business. When we meet them, the two are friends, who have somehow missed the point where they might have become lovers. Chiaki is also the daughter of a senior policeman. It's through her eyes that we see the story.

The novel starts with the video of a ransom demand. An acquaintance, TOBA Sumako (鳥羽須磨子) has asked Chiaki's advice after receiving the video, which shows her stepson, TOBA Kunihiko  (鳥羽国彦), and her brother, TAKENAKA Kazumi (竹中和巳), tied up. In the video Takenaka is reading a ransom note to the camera, with the kidnappers' demands. Rejecting Chiaki's urgings to contact the police, Sumako sets off with the money. With no time to telephone and not knowing where Sumako has been told to go, Chiaki and Younosuke set off chasing after her Porsche in Younosuke's Sunny. Even though a kidnapping is a really unpleasant crime, the tone here is actually almost light hearted. Sumako drives to one café after another, evidently picking up instructions from the kidnappers. By quick thinking, Chiaki and Younosuke manage to discover the place where the next instruction is and inform the police. When Sumako goes to the final destination, an uninhabited island in a lake, connected to the mainland only by a long bridge, the police are waiting. To avoid being spotted by the kidnapper,  they have kept their distance; but there are boats on the lake and policemen watching from cover on the mainland. A little after Sumako reaches the island, the police hear a shot and rush there from the lake and from the mainland. Sumako has been shot, the killer is nowhere to be seen. The gun and the ransom money have gone too.

This is obviously a fairly open impossible crime. Escape via the lake, on the water or under the surface, cannot be absolutely ruled out, although the police seem confident that that would be impossible. Other possibilities are likely to occur to readers familiar with the form. But whatever we may have been speculating gets put aside about half way through, when a discovery removes this impossibility and replaces it with a new kind of impossibility.

The puzzle has an odd form: for most of the story, all our suspects are off scene, since everyone connected with the case is either dead or missing. The lighthearted tone also evaporates fairly quickly. Chiaki starts looking like she might be a typical figure of Japanese popular literature, the attractive young woman who always gets what she wants by self confidence or wheedling or family connexions. But the depiction does not go very far in the "charming but infuriating" direction and treats her more seriously as a young woman deciding what she wants in life. The depiction of the two central characters is perhaps a little weak. Their profession is potentially interesting, but has no relation to the story; and we see very little of it. One could criticise the puzzle on the grounds that some bits are overclued and some underclued. It also demands that the police miss a few things, some understandably, some less so. The two main tricks are good enough for a novella, perhaps not quite for a full novel; but Okajima Futari are skilled at involving the story in interesting episodes.

I nearly left out the illustration here. I like that Japan keeps cover artists in business; and some are lovely. This isn't one of those. I put the picture size to "small".

Posting

Up to now, I've tried to post a review, translation or discussion at least once a week. But I'm incredibly busy with other things at the moment, and will be until summer. I expect that I'm going to be posting less for a while. I will have one more post this week though.

In case you haven't noticed, my usual pattern is one detective story post followed by one children's literature post, and mostly every other detective story author will be female (or male, depending where you start). Since this is a self referential post, I'll explain a convention I'm using now. If I give a book title or author's name in Japanese and English, then if there's a link in the Japanese part, it probably goes to a page in Japanese somewhere, if there's a link in the English, it will go to a page in English. I only developed the convention a few months after I'd started, so there will be some early posts where that doesn't apply. Also, as a reminder, if you want to know if I've written about a Japanese writer and can't find the name in the labels (since they're in Japanese and not in alphabetical order), the catalogue page (in the tab at the top of this page) lists reviews and translations in author order.

Songs of the Wind God

荻原規子 (OGIWARA Noriko, born 1959) is a children's writer specialising in fantasy, with some success in the west. Several of her books have been adapted into manga and anime, and two books from her best known fantasy series have been translated into English, her first book 空色勾玉 (1988) as Dragon Sword and Wind Child (1993) and 白鳥異伝 (1991) as Mirror Sword and Shadow Prince (2011). I've been reading a different fantasy, not yet translated into English, 風神秘抄 (Fuujin hishou, Songs of the Wind God, 2005). I'm not quite sure how to translate that, as my dictionaries don't have 秘抄. The word is made up of "secret" and "extract/excerpt"; specifically, the title is probably a reference to  梁塵秘抄 (Ryoujin hishou), an anthology of popular songs and folk songs compiled at the time the book is set. The novel is a romantic fantasy written in a modern western style, but set in medieval Japan, towards the end of the Heian era, when the Minamoto and Taira clans were fighting for control of the country. In an afterword, Ogiwara indicates that she sees the book as a kind of fourth volume of the series that starts with Dragon Sword and Wind Child, but independent of it, so that it can be read without having read the earlier books.

The hero Soujuurou (草十郎) starts the story as a teenager fighting on the Minamoto side in the Heiji Rebellion of 1160. He has a lonely childhood behind him. His mother, a flute player, died in childbirth, and his samurai father's family did not want this child from a different mother, so that he was raised separately and grew up a lonely child, playing the flute he inherited from his mother in the hills where no-one could hear. The rebellion does not go well for the Minamoto; and the story begins with the final battle, and subsequent flight of the defeated forces. This desperate journey is very well described; and we share the experience of the young Soujuurou, as he and the young Minamoto boy he accompanies, Minamoto no Yoritomo, slowly realise that the defeat was more than a setback and that everyone they meet from now on is potentially their enemy.

Separated from the party, Soujuurou learns later that the Minamoto leader to whom he feels loyalty has been executed and secretly visits Kyoto to see if the report is true. It is. He sees the general's head hung from a tree. But he also finds a priest and a young dancing girl, Itose (糸世) secretly performing a dance to comfort the spirits of the dead. He joins their performance on the flute and the combination of flute and dancer give the dance magical powers.

Soujuurou still feels despair and has no meaning in his life after the defeat of his side. Learning that Yoritomo has been captured and is being taken to Kyoto for execution, he prepares to attack the Taira forces accompanying him, in effect throwing his life away. Before he can do so Itose seeks him out again and persuades him to help her dance once more, in an effort to change Yoritomo's fate. The magic is successful and Yoritomo's judgement is changed to exile in Izu; but the magic has been noticed. Soon various powerful nobles in Kyoto are looking to find the two performers for their own purposes.

The fantasy element of the story is largely limited to the effects of the flute and dance. But there is also a talking crow who is a major character. Soujuurou's flute playing draws wild animals to him, much like Orpheus or Tamino in the west. (I don't know if Japanese culture has similar myths; but the book reads like a reworking of the Orpheus myth in other respects too.) The crow Torihiko Ou (鳥彦王) is one of the creatures that Soujuurou's playing attracts. The name means King Malebird. Among the crows, a line of divine descent often has female birds who can speak and understand humans. Males with such ability are rare and destined to become king. Torihiko Ou, accompanied by seven comrades, is seeking experience of the human world and chooses to accompany Soujuurou.

"Shrines where humans worship somehow just don't register, they just slip out of my head, whoosh, like that."

"Do birds have gods they worship, then?" Soujuurou asked.

Of course there were, the answer came back. "I know there are gods. I, after all, am a direct descendant of them."

"You .... you're trying to tell me that you yourself are a being that receives worship."

"What's that? Didn't you know? Torihiko Ou is the living god of the birds, pal."

While Soujuurou wondered whether, with that attitude and that language, "living god" was not going too far, the crow hopped onto his head and continued talking with great self approval.

Like many fantasies it's a long book. On the whole it manages its large story well; but occasionally it loses steam. There's a bit too much reliance on having third parties praise the two leading characters, rather than allowing us to get to see their qualities for ourselves. And the broader strokes of these two characters seem to come from familiar types in fantasy and Japanese popular literature. The greatest achievement is probably the combination of the fantasy with a Heian setting. That does mean that a non Japanese reader will have some hard going through pages filled with unfamiliar names, titles and objects.

The Great Merlini

After writing about Hake Talbot's Rim of the the Pit a little while ago, it may skew the focus of the blog to write about another English language detective story here. I don't mean to write many reviews of non-Japanese books; but once in while I hope it won't hurt. Since a recently bought ipad makes reading ebooks practical for me, I downloaded a book I'd been wanting to read since I heard about it in a review on the blog At the Scene of the Crime, The Great Merlini (2012), a collection of  Clayton Rawson's Great Merlini short stories. The edition I read was the iBooks version published by MysteriousPress; since the introduction by Eleanor Sullivan is copyright 1979, I take it that this is a reprint (or digitalisation) of an earlier edition.

The Great Merlini is Clayton Rawson's detective, a magician and supplier of magic tricks to other magicians (does that sound familiar?), who sometimes helps the police with baffling, apparently impossible crimes. I had read two of the stories in anthologies, and also the four novels, Death from a Top Hat (1938), The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939), The Headless Lady (1940) and No Coffin for the Corpse (1942). All the novels are enjoyable books with a lot of ingenuity. Death from a Top Hat and No Coffin for the Corpse both feature excellent locked rooms, and Rawson repeatedly finds new tricks to play on our expectations as experienced detective story readers. And then Merlini really is an excellent detective: high spirited, but with his eccentricity more or less limited to his profession; an amateur, but one with a real specialist knowledge relevant to the kind of cases he gets involved in. The characters tend towards familiar types of mid twentieth century American crime fiction. In particular gruff, no-nonsense Inspector Gavigan, constantly irritated by the bizarre crimes he has to investigate is a figure I seem to have met many times (perhaps a William Demarest role).

The two short stories that I already knew are probably the best of Rawson's work. In particular, "Off the Face of the Earth" is a brilliant impossible crime. A man claiming to be from another world has predicted the disappearance of the judge who ordered his detainment as a material witness in another case. The police suspect that the judge himself wants to disappear in any case, as he is under investigation for corruption. Two detectives tail him to the station, where they see him enter a phone box. When he doesn't come out, they go to look and find the phone box empty, the receiver off the hook and the judge's voice at the other end, giving a mocking message to the detective. It's a very nicely worked impossible crime; and Rawson manages to go one better by having Merlini himself disappear from a phone box that the narrator and Inspector Gavigan are watching later in the story.

"From Another World", the other often anthologised story, is a neatly worked out "sealed room murder", literally sealed in this case, as there is paper tape pasted over the doors and windows, all part of a test of a claimed possessor of psychic powers, who is found unconscious in the room with her millionaire patron, who has been murdered. Suspicion naturally falls on the fake medium; but the real weapon is not in the room. This is very well done. I saw through the trick, so to speak, but didn't find it a worse story for that.

None of the other stories in the collection are on this level. Many are deliberately elementary short short stories, some used as contests for readers to test their skill on in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. All of these are competent for what they are; but the mystery or the deductive element is sometimes not very interesting (a tedious discovery of contradictions). There are two or three other longer short stories, of which the best was "Nothing is Impossible", I think. A rich investigator of UFOs is shot in his locked study. His son in law is with him, but i) unconscious, ii) naked (his clothes are next to him arranged as if he was still wearing them). The detectives find no gun in the room, only a set of tiny three toed footsteps. The set up is another of Rawson's attempts to keep the locked room up to date. Instead of traditional supernatural suggestions, we have extraterrestrials and Rhine's parapsychology as background in the stories. This makes the stories now an interesting window on the time.

This was the first ebook I've read. On the whole the printsetting was no worse than most publishers. I noticed two forgivable misprints ("If s" for "It's" twice), presumably an OCR error; but it looked like someone had gone through and made a reasonable attempt to get rid of such errors. My iBooks edition did have one big and rather disappointing mistake. The story "Nothing is Impossible" was evidently meant to have an illustration of the three toed footprint. This is missing there, but turns up in the middle of a later story, "Merlini and the Photographic Clues", where we really don't want it at all.

Two Genres

In one sense this blog has a fairly clear focus, the Japanese books that I read. On the other hand, probably some people reading it will want to skip every other post, as I generally alternate between two genres, detective stories and children's literature. Thinking about that reminded me how many detective story writers are also children's writers, in Britain at least. Defining children's writers is a bit tricky. The "young adult" genre is a recent invention. Despite it's name it's actually only meant for (older) children. Before that there were plenty of works which might be shelved in the normal "fiction" department of a library or bookshop, but were often or mostly read by children, Conan Doyle for instance. The detective story category is perhaps a bit ambiguous, too. For instance, if you don't treat the genre borders too strictly, you could include Robert Louis Stevenson for The Wrecker (1892). I glanced throught the Wikipedia categories for British children's and mystery writers to remind myself, and made the little list below, which probably misses quite a few writers. I've given one representative work for each genre and I've put what I thought was the more important one in bold. The more recent writers are hard to judge; but I think it's surprising how many writers have made a significant contribution to each genre. All of the writers with an entry in both categories before 1980 are important enough to expect a mention in any history of the genre. [Update: I'd forgotten T. H. White. I haven't read his Darkness at Pemberly, but most of those who have seem to have a high opinion of it. Update 2: apparently Gladys Mitchell wrote several children's stories. Thanks for the comments and link to the Gladys Mitchell website.]

Author	Detective story	Children's story
Joan Aiken	Trouble with Product X (1966)	Arabel's Raven (1972)
Nina Bawden	The Odd Flamingo (1954)	Carrie's War (1973)
Nicholas Blake (Cecil Day-Lewis)	A Question of Proof (1935)	The Otterbury Incident (1948)
Michael Bond	Monsieur Pamplemousse (1983)	A Bear Called Paddington (1958)
Christianna Brand	Heads You Lose (1941)	Nurse Matilda (1964)
Peter Dickinson	The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest (1968)	The Weathermonger (1968)
A. A. Milne	The Red House Mystery (1922)	Winnie the Pooh (1926)
J. K. Rowling (Robert Galbraith)	The Cuckoo's Calling (2013)	Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)
Jill Paton Walsh	The Wyndham Case (1993)	The Emperor's Winding Sheet (1974)
T. H. White	Darkness at Pemberley (1932)	Mistress Masham's Repose (1946)

And what does Japan look like? I don't really know; but my impression is that writers in both genres are rare (or were until recently). One exception is detective story juveniles, which seem to be quite common in Japan. Many authors of normal detective stories seem to write these too. Both EDOGAWA Rampo (江戸川乱歩) and YOKOMIZO Seishi (横溝正史) wrote stories with their series detective aimed at children. That might have the advantage, I guess, that the authors are not just selling a children's book, they're preparing readers of their adult books. Of course it might work the other way: people who read a KINDAICHI Kousuke novel as children might associate the books with childish reading and avoid them as adults. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Tolkien who wrote books with the same characters for children and adults in English.

Apart from juvenile detective fiction, I only know of NIKI Etsuko (仁木悦子), who as well as detective stories, wrote a successful collection of children's stories under the name  大井三重子 (OOI Mieko), 水曜日のクルト (Suiyoubi no curuto, 1961), and MIYABE Miyuki (宮部 みゆき), one of the most successful modern Japanese crime fiction writers. Several of her mysteries have been translated into English, e. g. 火車 (Kasha, All She Was Worth, 1992). So have some of her children's fantasy books, e. g. ブレイブ・ストーリー (Brave Story, 2003). (I haven't read any of her books yet; but I've got a couple in my pile of books waiting to be read, so I'm sure I'll get around to her soon.) There must be more than that, I imagine. What have I missed?

Delivery Red Riding Hood

People who like books probably like bookshops too, if only because they have lots of books in them, though I don't suppose anyone feels much affection for the big chain stores whose staff have no idea of the product they're selling. When I visited Japan a couple of years ago, I found the bookshops a little trying. I had brought with me a list of books I wanted to buy; and expected to be able to find them by looking at the alphabetic position of the author on the shelves, probably sorted by genre, as in a German or English shop. That is, in an English bookshop, Agatha Christie will either be under 'Crime Fiction', if the shop has a section for it, or under 'Fiction'. In Japanese shops, the books are arranged by publisher. So if you don't know the publisher (and when I made my list, I hadn't thought to note that down), you can't find the book. I suspect that a reason for this is that Japanese names are problematic even for Japanese readers, and each publisher has a code on the spine with the first letter of the author surname plus a number showing in what order it should go on the shelves. Anyway, if you're making your first trip to Japan and planning to buy Japanese books, take my advice and make a note of the publisher too.

This kind of arrangement makes browsing a bit difficult. For writers to have a chance of attracting the attention of readers just looking at the shelves, it must be much more important than in Europe to have the right publisher. In the afterword to 配達 あかずきん (Haitatsu akazukin, Delivery Red Riding Hood, 2006) by 大崎梢 (OOSAKI Kozue), the editor 戸川 安宣 (TOGAWA Yasunobu) writes that the genre 新本格 (shinhonkaku, "new orthodox detective stories") is particularly associated with Kodansha, while Tokyo Sougensha is the leader in　日常の謎　(Nichijou no nazo, "puzzles of everyday life"). As the name suggests, these are mysteries involving either a fairly minor crime or no crime at all. The Japanese seem to be the first to give the genre a name; but the thing itself has been around for a while. If you count Kleist's Der zerbrochne Krug (1808), you could say that it's older than the detective story. (The play could also be called the first courtroom drama mystery and the first appearance of the "least likely culprit", at least formally.) I remember someone mentioning Asimov's "Black Widowers" stories in this context; they are a good example of the kind of minor or non criminal puzzle characteristic of the form. It's sometimes said that the Golden Age of detective stories marked a concentration on only murder, unlike the Sherlock Holmes stories and other works of the period, which had included a variety of crimes and even mysteries without a crime. This is perhaps more a move to novels away from short stories. The short stories that Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie wrote also feature several crime free mysteries.

配達 あかずきん is a collection of five short stories set in what sounds like a mid sized bookshop in the shopping centre attached to a station. The main characters are full time shop assistant 杏子　(Kyouko), and part timer 多絵 (Tae). Kyouko is an industrious and capable bookseller in her mid twenties, Tae is a few years younger, a law student. They do have surnames, I think; but they are hardly ever used. Mostly they are just Kyouko and Tae, or in conversation Kyouko-san and Tae-chan (because of status, I suppose). Kyouko is always our point of view in the stories, Tae is the detective. The 'cases' generally start as non criminal problems; but a couple of stories in the collection do involve actual crimes, even one quite serious crime. For the most part, though, they take an aspect of bookshop life and use it as a little mystery. In the first story, a customer brings a friend's incomprehensible book order. Finding what he was asking for becomes an exercise in code breaking. In the second, a woman is looking for her mother, who went missing after hearing some children discussing the Genji Monogatari manga in the bookshop. In the third, the magazine the shop delivers to a nearby hairdresser has had an insulting stolen photograph of a customer inserted in it. In the fourth a women is looking for the shop assistant who advised her mother with suggestions for books for her when she was in hospital; but no-one fitting the description works at the shop. In the last, the display for a popular shounen manga is vandalised, perhaps in connexion with accusations on the internet that the work was plagiarised from an earlier doujinshi.

I like the idea of mysteries without a major crime; and I'll certainly read more in the genre. The cases here didn't include any compellingly brilliant deductions; but they are recognisably still mysteries. The emphasis is on a depiction of life behind the scenes of a bookshop. The stories are slightly humorous, slightly sentimental.

The Borrowers

Mary Norton's 1952 novel The Borrowers is a classic of British children's literature. The book and its sequels have been read by generations of children now, and adapted for television and film many times. One such adaptation is a recent Studio Ghibli film, 借りぐらしのアリエッティ (Karigurashi no arietti, The Secret World of Arrietty, 2010).  Ghibli is the studio of MIYAZAKI Hayao (宮崎駿), who directed many of Japan's best animated films. Arrietty is directed not by Miyazaki, but by YONEBAYASHI Hiromasa (米林 宏昌). Still, Miyazaki was one of the writers of the screenplay. As with other Ghibli films where Miyazaki was screenwriter, but not director, the story is better constructed, but perhaps less imaginative. I suspect that as director he can change his mind more and follow his own ideas, even when it's too late to work them into the story properly.

The Borrowers is a story of little people. Borrowers live under the floorboards or behind the panelling of human's houses. They take small amounts of human food and put unwanted or unnoticed little objects to new uses for their furniture and tools. Little people stories are popular in Japan: I wrote earlier about INUI Tomiko's 木かげの家の小人たち (Kokage no ie no kobitotachi, The Little People in the House in the Tree's Shadow, 1959) and SATOU Satoru's だれも知らない小さな国 (Dare mo shiranai chiisana kuni, A Little Country No-one Knows, 1959). The Borrowers itself had been translated into Japanese in 1956; and it's easy to imagine that it had an influence, particularly on the character of Inui's family (who are after all English fairies, thought living in Japan).

When I saw the film, it had been decades since I read the book; and my impression was that the two were quite similar. The only difference I noticed while watching was that the boy had been made older, so that he looked the same age as Arietty, allowing viewers to see it as a kind of romance. On rereading the book, I found that the film actually makes lots of changes of plot and detail, though both the outline and the ideas are still largely derived from the book.

My memories of the book were quite vague, so rereading brought some surprises. In particular, it's very well written, in a particular way – with a love of small, accurate detail. This is the kind of thing that appeals to some children and not others, I think. It's certainly less common in recent children's books. Conveniently, the children it does appeal are probably going to be the kind of children who like stories about tiny people hiding in human's houses. The careful detail is partly in the dialogue, partly in the description of the little world the characters live in, and the things they adapt to their needs. I also had no memory of the elements of satire in the story, which comes from a more class conscious age (and is set somewhere around 1900, where class was even more an issue). Here is Arrietty's mother talking about the other borrower families that had once live in the house.

'Who were the Overmantels?' asked Arrietty.

'Oh you must've heard me talk of the Overmantels,' exclaimed Homily, 'that stuck-up lot who lived in the wall high up – among the lath and plaster behind the mantelpiece in the morning-room. And a queer lot they were. The men smoked all the time because the tobacco jars were kept there; and they'd climb about and in and out the carvings of the overmantel, sliding down the pillars and showing off. The women were a conceited lot too, always admiring themselves in all those bits of overmantel looking-glass. They never asked anyone up there and I, for one, never wanted to go. ... I don't know whether it's true but they do say that those Overmantel men used to have a party every Tuesday after the bailiff had been to talk business in the morning-room. Laid out, they'd be, dead drunk – or so the story goes – on the green plush tablecloth, all among the tin boxes and the account books –'

'Now, Homily,' protested Pod, who did not like to gossip, 'I never see'd 'em.'

'But you wouldn't put it past them, Pod. You said yourself when I married you not to call on the Overmantels.'

'They lived so high,' said Pod, 'that's all.'

There's something in a story about tiny people that invites writers to look at the petty side of the human character, in Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), for instance, and in Terry Pratchett's Truckers (1989), which incidentally is a very good children's book, in a different way. Pod and Homily both have a limited outlook on the world and are to some extent figures of fun for the author, but still impressive, as they face the constant dangers that their lives involve. Here they are discussing Arrietty's education.

'Now, now,' said Pod, 'don't bring up the past.'

'But you've got to think of it! they got the cat and –'

'Yes,' said Pod, 'but Eggletina was different.'

'How different? She was Arrietty's age.'

'Well they hadn't told her, you see. That's where they went wrong. They tried to make her believe that there wasn't nothing but was under the floor. They never told her about Mrs Driver or Crampfurl. Least of all about cats.'

'There wasn't any cat,' Homily pointed out, 'not till Hendreary was "seen".'

'Well, there was, then,' said Pod. 'You got to tell them, that's what I say, or they try to find out for themselves.'

'Pod,' said Homily solemnly, 'we haven't told Arrietty.'

The Ghibli film changes the emphasis in several ways. Homily is much the same houseproud, fearful character as in the book, Pod is significantly changed. In both book and film, he is gruff and straightforward; but film Pod is more dour and more heroic and the film makes more of Arrietty's relationship to him. Arrietty is a similar character in book and film, but book Arrietty is more stifled. At the beginning of the book, unlike film Arrietty, she has never been outside the little home under the floorboards. As I said above, the boy in the book is much younger than Arrietty, so that the character of their friendship is very different. Two new elements are borrowed from later in the series, Spiller and the voyage in a kettle. The borrowers riding the tin kettle is on the cover of the Japanese translation of The Borrowers Afloat.