Magical mysteries
Ruth Marris
The Child in the Bamboo Grove Rosemary Harris, illustrated by Errol le Cain (Faber £1.40) The Squirrel Wife Philippa Peace illustrated by Derek Collard (Longman £1.20) The picture-story book reaches its zenith when both story and pictures achieve a real harmony — when the illustrations speak, rather than simply decorate; when author and artist are each working with a sympathy and understanding for the other's talent. Rosemary Harris and Errol le Cain show that this can be achieved in their beautiful book The Child in the Bamboo Grove, a Japanese folk tale ja which Yashido, a lonely, elderly, bamboo cutter whose "life was empty as a hollow stem" finds, inside a bamboo reed, a tinY child with "a thread-like cry." When he cuts open another reed, showers of gold coins fall out, thus providing the wherewithal to bring up his new-found daughter.
The Lady Kaguya, "The Precious Slender Bamboo of the Autumn Fields," groW5 up into an exceptionally beautiful girl and many suitors seek her hand. She refuses to see any of them and, after setting tasks
for the five most ardent, which exploit their individual weaknesses, she is sought by the Emperor himself. We discover she is a daughter of the Sun, and once the Emperor has seen her face, to the Sun she must return. Her grieving, adopted father is a little comforted by the mantle she leaves behind; the broken-hearted Emperor has, as a memorial, the everlasting fire on Mount Fuji-yama, the never dying mountain, and "as other men have the memory of their beloved recreated by known artists, so he had many, many paintings made of Fuji-yama."
The style is formal and reverent, and although the story has elements of folklore that are international (it reminds us of the East European folk tale in which a prince splits open a reed and finds his bride—a more fortunate man than the Japanese Emperor) it is essentially a Japanese story. This is borne out by the nature of the illustrations. Errol le Cain adopts the Japanese style and the philosophy underlying it by depicting man, the important element, out of all proportion to the landscape in which he is set. These are delicate misty paintings, strong yet subtle in colour, the technique formal although not rigid. The reader moves from text to pictures as equal parts of the same whole. This is an enormously attractive book.
It is unlikely that a more aesthetically pleasing book than The Squirrel Wife will be produced this year: a sensitive and resonant story, brown print on cream paper, each page with a border of flowers and leaves and illuminated capitals, dark strong colours in the many wood engravings. Jack, a poor swineherd, hears a desperate cry for help from the forest one night during a storm. He goes out and finds one of the much-feared Green People trapped under a fallen tree. Jack rescues the green man and is rewarded with a wife who has a strange knowledge of the ways of the forest.
This is only the beginning of Jack's extraordinary adventures. The story echoes and adds to already known folk tales; it is dark, mysterious and green, full of wonder and anticipation. Derek Collard's wood engravings capture the atmosphere exactly; daylight or moonlight are a long way off, beyond the furthest trees. We are in the heart of the forest, far from men and the everyday world, where only the unexpected is expected. But beyond the forest in that barely suggested daylight the real world does exist; gay, colourful, rural, mediaeval—the endpapers of the book and a single picture portray it with a wealth of intricate detail of domestic life. Before and after the enchantment and the green depths of the forest, there is everyday reality, the other side of the coin. Jack finally finds happiness in the ordinary pursuits of his own world, when his squirrel wife becomes more wife than squirrel, and no longer understands the ways of the forest.
So, as in The Child in the Bamboo Grove, there is loss as well as gain, the loss of the knowledge of magic. Both books seem to say that mortal and immortal cross and recross each other's paths, but cannot finally be united.
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