Japanese
The Raccoon Who had Never Washed his Face and Wildcat, the Blessed Feline|
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Japanese The Raccoon Who had Never Washed his Face and Wildcat, the Blessed Feline |
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The three animals met with a disastrous result, by following their teacher's instruction The strange feeling with the intermingling of humor and eeriness  |
A spider with long arms, a silver-colored slug, and a raccoon who had never washed his face--quite curious a company of three--graduated from the Badger School.
Mr. Badger had taught them that "the biggest person was held in most respect." Following their teacher's instruction, the three competed to see who could get to be the biggest, but each of them met with a disastrous result.All three tried to become the biggest by deceiving other creatures and eating them up. Their conversations with the other creatures engender a srange feeling in the readers with their intermingling of humor and eeriness.
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| The slug dissolving a lizard by licking | One day a lizard came to the slug to ask for some medicine for a snake bite. The slug said, "I'll just give it a little lick for you. If I lick it the snake poison will soon disappear. It ought to, seeing that I can dissolve the snake itself, Ho-ho-ho!" But the lizard was surprised to feel his own leg starting to dissolve and the slug kept licking and said, "ho-ho-ho, you shouldn't let it bother you." At last the lizard stopped worring because just at the moment his heart had melted away.
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| The raccoon biting a rabbit The wildcat, the Blessed Feline |
The raccoon who had never washed his face dubiously exploited other animals' belief in Wildcat, the Blessed Feline, to deceive them. When a rabbit came and appealed to the raccoon for help because he was about to starve, the raccoon replied, "There doesn't seem much hope. But it's all the will of Wildcat, the Blessed Feline. Ave feles, ave feles! " Drawing the rabbit near, the raccoon took a bite of his ear. Though the rabbit cried in alarm, the raccoon calmed him, saying, "Everything on earth is ordained by the will of Wildcat. Ah, the ineffable wisdom that decrees that I should chew your ears down to a reasonable size! Ave feles--" Hearing this, the rabbit was gradually filled with joy and began to shed tears. "Ave feles, Ave feles, blessed be Wildcat!"
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| The raccoon burst open with a great boom | Behaving this way, the raccoon eventually came to eat even a wolf. But the next day on, the raccoon felt ill. "Finally, on the twenty-fifth day after he had eaten the wolf, the raccoon, whose body was swollen up like a rubber balloon by now, burst open with a great boom." |
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Material in quotation marks is from Once and FOREVER, the tales of kenji miyazawa, translated by John Bester, published by Kodansha International. |
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