Updates

I don't generally bother to announce new translations of books I've reviewed separately; but if you're interested in children's literature, a new translation of one of INUI Tomiko's best books, The Little People in the House in the Tree's Shadow (木かげの家の小人たち), is good news. Pushkin Press are publishing a translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori, as The Secret of the Blue Glass (the title seems to be taken from the French translation, presumably because the Japanese title becomes unwieldy in English). There's a sample here at the Guardian just now (not the best bit to give an idea of the book).

I've added a note to the original post. Although a blog is pretending to be a diary, I do occasionally edit old posts. Mostly it's because I spot a spelling mistake or minor grammatical error. In that case I make the change silently. If it's anything more substantial, I try and make the change more visible, mostly by adding a square bracket with "UPDATE" in it.

Musika and Misika of the Far North

I wrote about INUI Tomiko's A Long, Long Penguin Story (ながいながいペンギンの話 by  いぬいとみこ) last year. 北極のムーシカミーシカ　(Hokkyoku no muushika miishika, Mushika and Mihsika of the Far North, 1961) is literally its polar opposite. In every other sense, though, the two books are very similar. A Long, Long Penguin Story describes the childhood adventures of two penguins brothers in the antarctic. Mushika and Mishika of the Far North describes the childhood adventures of two brothers, polar bear cubs, in the arctic. The book was made into a cartoon film of the same name in 1979 (given the English title Adventures of the Polar Cubs). I haven't seen this myself. I assume that the illustration on the book's cover is taken from it.

As in A Long, Long Penguin Story, Inui lets the animal characters talk and think like people, but otherwise tries to show their lives as they really are. So, for instance, the father of the cubs has no part in raising them. We follow the mother and the two cubs from when they emerge from the snow cave they have lived in through the winter over the first years of their lives. Mishika is mischievous, Mushika is curious and inquisitive. A third cub, a girl Mashika, joins them when the brothers find her next to her mother who has been shot by hunters.

Looking at the cover, you're probably thinking that if the book is true to nature, that seal had better look out for itself, since seals are a major part of the polar bear's diet. The harsh necessity of polar life is actually a key theme of the book. The cubs make friends with various animals; but they come to understand that the lives of the animals of the arctic involve eating other animals.

"But, but, if the little human hadn't saved Mishika -" Mashika said, still shivering.

"Why couldn't the big human understand? How happy we were that Mishika and mother didn't get shot -" Mushika said angrily.

Here mother spoke, "It's something I told Mishika before, but in this harsh land of the north, since nothing is more important than finding food to survive, parents teach their children how to hunt. The humans teach their children to hunt seals and bears, bears teach their children to hunt seals and herring, and seals teach their children to hunt herring and cod. But those parents know that taking a life is something truly horrible for the being whose life is taken. Mishika, you know, destroying Oora's fellow seals is not something that I want to do. But the law of the polar bears is that the parent must at some time teach their cub to hunt seal ..... so that we can go on living."

Mishika and the other cubs were silent.

The book is aimed at younger readers. The cover suggests a reading age of seven or above, and says it can be read to children from the age of four. I can imagine that some of the material in the book might be difficult for very young readers, such as the scene on an abandoned seal hunter's ship where Mishika, whose best friend was the seal cub Oora, first sees his mother eating seal meat. The book tries to give readers and characters a chance to come to terms with this world in the summer festival that marks its climax, a magical event where all the different animals of the arctic can meet for a few days without fear of being eaten.

The Little People of the Valley of Darkness

くらやみの谷の小人たち　(The Little People of the Valley of Darkness,  1972) by INUI Tomiko is a sequel to 木かげの家の小人たち(The Little People of the House in the Tree's Shadow, 1959), which I wrote about earlier. The first book combined a fantasy story, a Japanese family caring for English fairies, with a depiction of Japan in wartime, the people's lack of food and their intolerant patriotic fervour. The book had spanned more than one generation of the Moriyama family, and the sequel similarly takes the story through to the next generation, represented in particular by Jun, the son of Shin, the jingoistic middle brother of the first book.

In a sense 木かげの家の小人たち leaves a lot unsettled, but it's not clear that it really needed a sequel. The tentative half resolution is what one might expect to come out of the experiences the characters had gone through, and the uncertainties that face them feel like the author's intention. Inui explains in the afterword that she had started on a sequel in 1967 (as she announced in the afterword to an edition of the first book), but it had taken that long to finish it. Still, the long gap means that the way of looking at things seems to have changed from book to book (like Ursula Le Guin's Tehanu). The first book had very few "adventure" elements; but the sequel is largely an adventure story, although it has some parts devoted to description or consideration of the period it describes, in particular of the first hungry years after the war, but also the reaction of the Moriyama family to changes in Japanese society and attitudes. In addition some of the new ideas about the blue cup from the first book seem to involve a rather ruthless rewriting of the original concept (indeed they undermine the major plot driver of the first book).

The Japanese kobito, Amanejaki, had been one of the more energetic characters from the first book, which ended with Iris and Robin leaving their parents and joining him in his home in a wood near Lake Nojiri. The sequel follows their adventures and brings in a large cast of Japanese kobito, most of them apparently spirits of Japanese flowers. These live in a dark underground world, which is dominated by the hostile spirits of various trees. The smaller spirits are searching for the spring of "The water of life", and their enemies are planning to exterminate them by bringing the "river of death" into the valley. This is a bit too much of a typical fantasy battle of good and evil; and only one character on the "evil" side is really given any personality or story.

The depiction of the river of death's effects perhaps reflects concerns about radiation sickness (the book mentions the atom tests on Bikini Atoll and the effects of the dust from the explosion on wildlife and on a Japanese fishing ship); but it presumably symbolises something more like an orientation towards war. Iris, as in the first book, is knitting as a prayer for peace in the world. This does not stop the good party from fighting against their enemies, although actual fights make up only a tiny part of the book.

If this sounds like an unnecessary and inferior sequel, it is still a well written book, with many impressive episodes.

The Little People of the House in the Tree's Shadow

木かげの家の小人たち is a children's book from 1959 by INUI Tomiko (discussed here). As with A Long Long Penguin Story, there's no English translation. But if you speak French, Le secret du verre bleu seems to be a translation. [UPDATE: There is now an English translation, "The Secret of the Blue Glass" (2015) by Ginny Tapley Takemori, published by Pushkin Press.] The book reads as if it is aimed at older readers than ながいながいペンギンの話, and it's quite long, just under 300 pages in my edition. (Japanese books are small. So there isn't room for much text on a page; but a Japanese page probably works out to not much less than an English paperback. The syllable alphabet and lack of spaces between words saves space.)

The story is a fantasy featuring tiny people, like many children's books in English and Japanese literature. Inui in an afterword mentions being enthralled by a book on fairies by Yeats; and the little people here are in fact British fairies. MORIYAMA Tatsuo's English teacher brought the little people with her when she came to Japan as a young woman. Now, in 1914, she is returning to England and asks Tatsuo to look after them, giving him a blue glass in which they must be given milk every day. Tatsuo installs them in an unused bookroom in a tree shadowed corner of the house. And there they stay, provided with milk first by Tatsuo then by later generations of the family.

But the core of the story is the experience of life in wartime Japan, which the little people first witness as two men come into their room, pulling volumes from the shelves to pile up on the floor as they search through the books.

"The books here are mostly just the children's books."

"Madame, in your house is this the kind of book your children read?" said one of the men, pushing a black covered book in German in her face.

"Ah. Kropotkin. That's .... well yes, that is my father in law's -"

"For now we'll take it with us to the station for consideration."

The story on the one side centres on the young daughter of the family, Yuri, who is evacuated to the countryside and must try to find the milk that the fairies in her care need to live, on the other on the fairy family themselves, the parents, Balbo and Fern, who are accustomed to rely on the human family, and their children Robin and Iris, who gradually start exploring the world outside. The depiction of the wartime mood in Japan is fairly bitter: Yuri's father is imprisoned for unpatriotic sentiments; but one of her brothers thinks he deserves it for betraying the country and that Yuri is similarly unpatriotic in giving milk to the fairies. In the countryside where Yuri is sent, she soon becomes isolated, since the other children's families regard her family with disapproval, in particular the mother of her friend, who is proud of the her other sons, who have lost their lives in the war.　And sickness and the difficulty of getting milk lead to a bitter parting with the fairies in her care. The expanding horizons of Robin and Iris are more optimistic, as they make friends first with a pigeon then with a Japanese fairy. But although the book's ending is not exactly unhappy, and there is a reconciliation of sorts between Yuri and the fairies, the reader is likely to be left a little melancholy and thoughtful.

A Long, Long Penguin Story

I worry sometimes that if I only read detective stories, I may develope a lopsided vocabulary, so that I end up knowing the Japanese for 'dismembered', but not for 'cat'. Children's books have a lot of the vocabulary that everybody needs to know.  And for reading, they have another advantage: the kanji are almost all provided with furigana, so that you can know the pronunciation of any new compound you meet. (I've sometimes found that I've learnt a word wrong reading detective stories, when the meaning is clear from the kanji, but it's an unusual mix of on- and kun- readings.) Some things get harder, though: children's books tend to use fewer kanji, so that sometimes you're looking at an endless string of kana and trying to work out where one word ends and the next begins. And of course, the language of children's books is not necessarily especially easy.

But ながいながいペンギンの話 (Nagai nagai pengin no hanashi, "A long, long penguin story") by いぬいとみこ (INUI Tomiko) is an easy book to read.  The cover of my edition says that it's suitable from the third or fourth year of primary school (age eight or nine). INUI Tomiko (1924-2002) was a editor of children's books when she wrote it. It was published first in installments in a doujinshi (an amateur literary magazine) from 1954 to 1956, and came out in book form in 1957.

INUI explains at the start that this is not the story of a long, long penguin, but a long, long story about Ruru and Kiki, two Adelie penguin children growing up in the Antarctic. According to the page on the book on the website of the (now disbanded) International Institute for Children's Literature, Osaka, shorter stories were typical for younger children at this age. It is still not a very long book (177 pages), and the story is divided into three self contained parts, all focusing on the more adventurous of the two brothers, Ruru.

Adelie penguins (from Wikimedia Commons: Hans Grobe, Creative Commons 3.0)

As an animal story, it tends towards the less realistic end of the spectrum. The penguins and other animals talk and think much like humans and their actions are not always realistic. But the penguins' real nature always provides a basis: their enemies are skuas and their food is krill. An episode in the middle has some curiosity value for western readers, with a visit to an Emperor Penguin colony used as the occasion for a satire of an excessively militarised society, which looks like a reaction to the military goverment that had led Japan into the war. It's a very readable book, with an optimistic and irrepressible hero, striving towards independence. Sadly the only translation seems to be in Slovenian ("Tučniačatá puk a kuk", I think, though the cover shows emperor penguins). The only book that seems to be translated into a language that I speak is 木かげの家の小人たち　(Kokage no ie no kobitotachi, "The little people of the house in the tree shadow") which has a French translation, "Le secret du verre bleu".  It's a very interesting fantasy book aimed at slightly older readers, and I might write something about it later.