たのしく心あたたまる子どもの文学：一年生

by various authors

22 December 2006



This is a book of poems and short stories for Japanese children in the first year of elementary school. I found it up on the second story of the University of Alaska Anchorage–Alaska Pacific University Consortium Library, amongst about a hundred other Japanese titles for children. I came across this collection of books by chance while wandering the stacks. I recognized the opportunity immediately: my Japanese skills are rudimentary enough that a children’s book is about all I can make it through without blowing a fuse.
Of all the Japanese books I've read, 子どもの文学　is the oldest title. Other than a few color plates at the beginning, the book is all in black & white. The drawings are simple and the reproduction is poor quality. But the makers of the book coordinated the text with the images quite well—the major action or theme of each page is captured in the drawing, which is extremely helpful to a beginning reader who has to look up nearly every word in the dictionary.
This is not the first Japanese children’s book I read, but it’s the longest so far at 171 pages, and I had to work away at it for about three months, picking it up and putting it down in accordance with all the other things going on in my life. At first, reading the book seemed a chore. Without the colorful pictures and spacious margins the other titles offered, part of the fun and the reward seemed to be gone. But as I read on, I began to appreciate the way the complexity of the language escalated in subtle increments as the text continued, and I began to notice the recurrent theme of wonder that unites many of the stories. Early on, we eavesdrop on beachside conversation carried out by a trio of crabs as they speculate what lies beyond the sea. Later on, in the four-page -long ぼくの　おんがくかい、a child narrator imagines what it would be like to have a classical music concert at sea. A set of simple drawings complement the childlike vision of a stage suspended over the waves by hot air balloons, while fish and sharks gather around to take in the sounds. In the story ちぉうちぉうのゆみ　we sit in on the dream of a butterfly who imagines he can cross over the rainbow to the country of the moon, where he meets a rabbit who makes rice cakes that, when flung into the sky, become silver stars. On the first page of the story, the text is bracketed by drawings: in the lower right corner (the text is read from top to bottom and from right to left) is the butterfly perched on a leaf, gazing up toward the upper left, through the lines of text to the rainbow.
I started taking Japanese a couple of years ago at the college level. The textbooks we use focus mainly on vocabulary that would be useful for grown-up situations: how to describe the personnel of a corporate office, how to read the rental advertisements in a newspaper classified section. Reading 子どもの文学, I began to appreciate the power of children’s stories in helping us learn a language. In the grown-up world, we are taught to focus mainly on social conventions and practicalities: we have to know how to address people so as not to offend them; we have to know the proper names of services and products so as to be able to get through each day with a minimum of fuss. But such distinctions are a compromise to the mind that wants to really learn something new. Going back to the simple, graphic conventions of children’s fiction gives us a hint of what the mind most naturally fastens onto.