The Fox's Window and Other Stories (review)

The Fox's Window and Other Stories is the first English-language collection of Naoko Awa's most representative works. Toshiya Kamei's elegant English translation captures the unique beauty of Awa's fantasy world and introduces one of the most popular Japanese writers of children's literature to English-speaking audiences. Awa, who disappeared from the literary scene with her death in 1993 at the age of fifty, was widely known by Japanese readers for the originality of her stories, grounded in Japanese folklore but, at the same time, enriched by the twists of her vivid imagination. During her long career as a writer, she developed a unique lyrical style that fascinated both critics and audiences. In fact, she won many awards, including the Japan Children's Literature New Author Award and the Shogakukan Literature Award, and was considered a "second mother" by the generation of young readers who grew up reading her stories, as Kamei explains in his translator's note. Her tale "The Fox's Window" became so popular that since 1992 it has been included in the Japanese textbooks for elementary school students.

The Fox's Window and Other Stories features thirty fairy tales ordered chronologically and published in Japan in a period of time spanning from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s. Some of them are based on a wide repertoire of Japanese folktales where foxes, tanuki badgers, cranes, yamanba (mountain witches), and other characters familiar to Japanese audiences interact with human beings and often play tricks on the villagers. Other tales are influenced by Awa's readings of the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen and by her studies of North European children's literature. The result of the encounter of these different narrative traditions is a collection of delightful and highly imaginative tales, where humans, animals, plants, and supernatural creatures move easily across different worlds by changing their shape and interact as if they were on the same level. For example, cosmos flowers send complaint letters to their noisy human neighbor ("Wind Chime in Autumn"), a weasel on roller skates steals a piece of smoked bacon from a farmer ("The Roller Skates in the Wind"), a whale gets married to a rich lady ("The Lost Earring"), three badgers pretend to be an old woman's grandchildren ("Wild Rose Village"), and a young girl turns into the mountain wind ("Becoming the Wind"). Some tales clearly take inspiration from Japanese folklore, while others evoke North European children's literature. For instance, "The Sky-Colored Chair" is set in a "northern town where potatoes and milk are delicious"; and "The Bird and the Rose" will remind Western readers of "Hansel and Gretel" when the protagonist finds a small house in the forest and meets a deceitful witch.

A clue to Awa's cross-border narrative, moving between Japan and Europe, can be found in "The Fox's Window," the tale inspiring the title of Kamei's collection. In a strange dye shop in the middle of the wood, a fox in human disguise dyes a hunter's fingers, creating a magic window in the hole made by his blue-dyed thumb and index fingers. This hole becomes the gateway to a new dimension, where time and space boundaries are overcome and past memories flood back into the present; inside the hole, the hunter watches the scenes of his childhood and hears the voices of his dead relatives. The fox's supernatural power affects also the world outside the hole, because a strange path opens in the wood, revealing a new, unexpected space between reality and fantasy. The magic of the fox's window is the secret underlying the structure of Awa's tales; like the fox's hole, the writer's surreal narrative creates a world where different space and time dimensions overlap, Japanese traditional folktales and European fairy tales merge, and the boundaries between human beings and natural elements are blurred. Her original fantasy world mirrors the Japanese attitude toward nature, because...