June is rainy season in Japan and boy, did it ever come with a vengeance at the end of May with torrential rains that swelled the rivers, and gusty winds that got the tree tops swaying!  Sometimes the rain would go on all night long and listening to it drip off the eaves made me think of a leaky faucet with its pit-pat-pit-pat sound on the roof and balcony.  We had to get used to carrying umbrellas everywhere (the trick is not to forget them somewhere when it’s stopped raining!) and I had to figure out a way of drying our laundry indoors.  Of course, rainy days put a damper on sightseeing, so I was very glad to discover a privately run childrens’ picture book library near my house.  Simply called Ehon Toshokan, or Picture Book Library, its small collection is located on the first floor of a house-like building near the Nigawa River in Nishinomiya.  A quaint, turreted building, it’s a great place to spend a rainy afternoon with a child or by yourself (as more than one mother mentioned to me!)  Dipping into the colorful world of illustrated Japanese childrens’ books was like taking a bath in wonderland.  I have long admired the work of Japanese artists in the field of book illustration and found some wonderful books to look at and read.  I was quite happy to stumble upon the Japanese equivalent of an alphabet book — a book of hiragana letters with accompanying words — by well known Japanese illustrator Mitsumasa Anno (whose books I’ve covered here before.)  In this hiragana book, Anno has shown the shapes of the hiragana letters as they might look if they were carved out of wood; accompanying the wooden letter is an image of a traditional Japanese object beginning with that letter.  Some of the items were unrecognizable to me so I had to look them up in the glossary at the back!  This is a great children’s primer on not only hiragana but of  the many objects unique to this country.  Of course, my focus was on Japanese picture books of which there were plenty, but when I took my daughter to the library she wanted to check out the English books available, of which there were also a number.  The library contains books from 27 countries in 18 different languages.   She settled on Jon Sciezka‘s The Stinky Cheese and Other Fairly Stupid Fairy Tales (illus. by Lane Smith, 1992) and had a blast reading it to me one rainy night.  There’s something about curling up with your child with a good book on a rainy day that makes it seem … well, less rainy!

The NY Time’s has recently published it’s Notable Children’s Books of 2010 and Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2010 articles. Our congratulations go out to all the authors and illustrators who are mentioned! Among those listed are :

Big Red Lollipop, by Rukhsana Khan, illustrated by Sophie Blackall  (Viking).

Busing Brewster, by Richard Michelson, illustrated by R. G. Roth (Alfred A. Knopf).

It’s a Book, written and illustrated by Lane Smith (Roaring Brook).

Ling and Ting: Not Exactly the Same! written and illustrated by Grace Lin (Little, Brown & Company).

Judging by the lovely book trailer below, It’s a Book by author and illustrator Lane Smith (to be released tomorrow by Roaring Brook Press), will sure be a hit! A book “for the technorati and literati alike”, it features a book-loving ape and a tech-savvy donkey talking digital vs. print. Just priceless!

It’s been a while since we read any fairy tales but our local library has recently added a goodly number of fairy tale books to its collection so we thought we’d delve in. We came home with an armful… some of them are traditional, others are modern (re)tellings or parodies.

I knew that Jon Scieszka’s The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales and The Frog Prince Continued would both go down well – they are funny and wittily illustrated (by Lane Smith and Steve Johnson respectively); and both depend on the kind of superior knowledge that children delight in – all the stories would be somewhat lost in the telling if you didn’t already know the originals.

The Lost Happy Endings by Carol Anne Duffy and illustrated by Jane Ray was visually irresistible. Duffy’s rich eloquence also lives up to all expectations: but a word of caution. Although this is a new story, she takes the fairy tale genre back to its grass-roots level. No wishy-washiness here. The retribution meted out to the thieving witch is absolute. It is more suitable for slightly older children: and should be cherished for that, for it sometimes seems that the older children get, the harder it is to find beautifully illustrated picture books for them. Certainly both my children relished both the pictures and the wonderful, descriptive language and each bore the book off to read independently after I’d read it to them.

There were several anthologies of traditional fairy tales to choose from and I have to admit I was slightly dubious as to how my boys would take to several nights in a row of traditional “happy-ever-after” tales: they assure me every time romance is mentioned that all that stuff is yeuch… But of course, I had fallen into the trap of equating fairy-tale with romantic and there is so much more to the traditional stories than that. Anthea Bell’s name is a talisman for me so her translation of Henriette Sauvant’s selection of Rapunzel and other Magic Fairy Tales was the obvious choice (helped by the surreal cover illustration)– and has been bourne out. We have so far enjoyed stories we know well, as well as come across some new to us all.