ISBN: 0803711352
Re-Read Oct 1, 2013
Picture Book: Kamakura Japanese folk-tale.
The story is straightforward - Samurai has a daughter and trains her as a
Samurai, and then as a lady, but she prefers the active life and fishes
with the women deep-sea divers off the coast. Samurai is banished due
to ruler's "mental instability" to a faraway island. Daughter gets
tired of being alone, and determines to head off to banishment with him,
facing typical quest-narrative difficulties in the process. Once on
the island, she's distracted by a girl getting sacrificed to the sea,
volunteers for the assignment, fights a sea-serpent, and rescues a
drowned statue. Conveniently enough, the statue is that of the ruler,
who is now healed of his mental problems, and summons the Samurai and
his daughter back home to Japan in full glory and honor.
I'm used to seeing Pinkney's drawings with San
Souci's words, so the illustrations were not quite as lavish and
textural as I expected. Johnson did a lovely job, and some of the
panels are very beautiful, but there's a flat quality to them that
heightens the flat nature of the narrative. Sadly, older folktales
aren't always the best at varied story-craft, so the tale itself is
example after example of Daughter breezily conquering challenges with no
real difficulty or peril. That, combined with the pat fairy-tale
ending, is a bit distancing.
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