Asakiyume mita

When last I shared from Semillas y Huevos, the kids were planting an egg. So now we have them sliding avocado seeds underneath a hen :-)



Only two pictures left to do (the avocado tree with eggs for fruit and the little chicks that are little walking, cheeping avocados, heh!)

For wakanomori's third-year Japanese class, he's having students read something from a different decade each week, starting with the present and working back over the course of the semester until 1900. A couple of weeks ago, they read a portion of a children's story from 1942, 白い子猫 (White Kitten), written and illustrated by Nakajima Kikuo.

In the story, the next-door neighbors have moved away, leaving behind two white cats, whom protagonist Ichiro and his little sister Hanako adopt. There are ups and downs--which mainly seem to consist of threats to the cats (the original pair are male and female, and soon there are kittens), plus deaths and seeming deaths--so maybe not the most fun reading, but the illustrations are wonderful slice-of-life brush drawings, full of personality:

Here Shiro ("White"), the dad cat, has learned to recognize Ichiro's footsteps and comes running to greet him when he comes home from school.



And here Shiro plays with Ichiro while Ichiro is bathing--look at the old-style bath!



Shiro's son Kojiro ("Little Shiro") sits on Father's shoulder while Father reads.



And the set behind the cut are the best: Kojiro sees a spider on the shōji, jumps at it, poking a hole in the shōji, and then peeks through and sees Yuki, his mother, in the other room, and leaps through to join her.

( Kojiro's shōji adventure )

Japan's been at war for seven years when this book comes out, but you'd never know it from the story or illustrations. There is NO sign of war--no soldiers, no rising-sun flags, nothing. Ichiro and Hanako are having a tranquil childhood in a big house, without a care in the world (except for cat deaths and threatened cat deaths).

Today in church one of the altar servers was wearing red ballet-slipper-style shoes with sparkles.



They were beautiful, and I was thinking, wow, church has come a long way since Hans Christian Andersen's time (different denomination, too, but let's sail by that issue), when the poor protagonist of "The Red Shoes" eventually HAS TO HAVE HER FEET CHOPPED OFF for the sin of indulging in vanity by wearing her red shoes to church. And then, even after she's repented and had her feet cut off, her bloody feet, dancing in the shoes, keep her from entering the church!

I have vivid memories of the illustrations accompanying this story from the version of HCA's fairy tales that we had when I was a kid--particularly the one of Karen, the protagonist, her hair a wild golden tangle, pleading with the executioner to cut off her feet. With much searching (a zillion people have illustrated HCA, including famous people like Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham), I found that the edition we had was called Stories from Hans Christian Andersen, illustrated by twin sisters, Anne and Janet Grahame Johnstone. They had an overly pretty, slim, stylized way of drawing people that I was fascinated by. I couldn't find the one illustration online, but I did find the one of her going into church all in white... but with the offending red shoes on. Unfortunately the person who took the photo cut off the feet (LOL), so you can't see the shoes, but you can see the glow from them:


(source)

If you click on the source link, you can get more of a sense of the illustrators' style. They had a great illustration for "The Wild Swans" of the prince who ends up still with one arm a wing, but I thought you might like this fairly hot (in an overly pretty way) picture from Tales of Greeks and Trojans:


(source)

A few months back I found a sad thing: a copy of Beatrix Potter's The Tailor of Gloucester frozen open in the ice on the road, and all mangled. I managed to pry the book free from the ice--minus its cover--but it was in bad shape.


But clever wakanomori realized that some of the pictures could be saved:



And when I saw that, I realized--these could be turned into cards. And so---







(There are others, but I'm only sharing the ones that I've already sent to people--no spoilers ^_^)

Julia Rios has written a charming, funny, beautiful retelling of Oracle Gretel, with Hansel-the-Cat and tarot cards and a ouija board and silver shoes to take you where you need to go. It's lovely! AND, she has gotten Erik Amundsen to illustrate it. His stylized figures convey so much--I love his art style (he did this icon of M--, from my pen pal novel).

And then, on top of writing a wonderful story and getting great illustrations for it, she picked out beautiful end papers and covers for it--no two the same--and hand bound each chapbook. She read from this at WisCon, and the chapbooks were available for sale there. I don't know how many she has left, but if you know her, and if you don't have a copy, you might like to enquire! She may have them available at Readercon next month, if they're not all gone by then.