This article was first published in the "Beijing News Children's Book". Beijing News Children's Books (xjbkids) is the children's book rudder of Book Review Weekly, which has joined forces with many publishing brands to select children's books for readers and answer educational puzzles.
People who like Naoko Anfang always resonate with the tranquility and sadness revealed in her "Fairy Tale Forest". Some people have commented that the biggest feature of Naoko Anfang's fantasy novels is that she sinks reality to the bottom of fantasy, thus blurring the line between reality and fantasy to the greatest extent.
Naoko Anfang is introverted and reclusive. There is not much information about her available on the Internet, and perhaps the frequent transfer from elementary school to secondary school has brought her insecurity and loneliness, so that her fantasies are always filled with a boundless loneliness, but she magically injects beauty into this loneliness, making them look not gray at all. With the exception of a few novels such as "Sky Deer", her works are short and exquisitely written, and her wisdom and indifference have healed her imperfect characters in the fantasy world.
Naoko Azuma is a Japanese children's literature writer.
Today we enter the "People Who Write Children's Books" column No. 6 – Japanese children's literature writer Naoko Anbo (1943-1993). Her real name is Naoko Minegishi, and she graduated from The Department of Japanese Liberal Arts at Japan Women's University. In 1969, he published his famous work "Pepper Doll", which won the Third Japan Children's Literature Association Newcomer Award, and has since embarked on the road of fantasy fiction creation. Among them, "The Fox's Window" was included in the 1992 Japanese elementary school textbook. The Domestic Relay Publishing House and the Children's Publishing House have introduced and published many of her works.
Her "fairy tale forest" has a strong Japanese folk atmosphere, and there are often ancient and mysterious spirits in the story, which quietly arrive in the way of "sneaking into the night with the wind", simple, beautiful and natural. Naoko Anfang's fantasy story is written not only for children, but also for the busy adults behind the children. Combined with her work, the following takes us to appreciate the unique aesthetics of "smell" and "micro".
Written by | Zhou Minggang
01
Unique an ampoule-style aesthetic of "smell" and "micro"
An interesting plot is described in the collection of classical Chinese novels, Liaozhai Zhiyi, in which a blind monk can judge the level of the copied articles by smelling the burning paper just by smelling them. I believe that most readers who read Naoko Anfang's fantasy works can easily feel the unique "smell" of Ambo without burning and without the ability of a blind monk: the dreamy and confusing story atmosphere, the delicate and gentle brushstrokes, the elements that combine the characteristics of the East and the West, the lonely and self-injured soul, the emotions of mixed sorrow and joy... Under the author's subtle "reconciliation", it is fused into an endless literary dream atmosphere and taste, and even makes people indulge in it and find it difficult to extricate themselves.
In my opinion, the most important thing to reconcile the atmosphere and taste of Anfang-style literature is the "micro" technique. Naoko Ambo is good at capturing beautiful scenes or tiny elements of life, "such as orange lights lit up in a snowy night, the figure of a girl running in a field of rape flowers, and a large group of white birds resting in the forest." Sometimes, it's just a blue or green color. ”
Naoko Anfang's work "Flower Field on a Handkerchief".
Start from the very subtle, chew on the timeless aesthetic taste, feel the endless time, space and people from the moment, and put it in the aesthetic fantasy to generate it. So, a bright yellow scarf, a string of wind chimes that can arouse memories, a blue field of orange-stemmed flowers or a large thistle field, a little light that flashes in the snowy night, a flag embroidered with silver and green peacocks... All can become the growth point of the fantasy world of The so-called "Mental Image" of Ambo, thus extending the complex and unique Ambo fairy tale forest.
Starting from this "mental image", Anfang also focused on describing those delicate emotions or unspeakable complex moods or the darkest pain: "Yellow Scarf" uses the choice and summoning of yellow scarves to express the breakthrough of the old man who lives alone who longs for a bright and happy life to break through the barriers in his heart; "Pepper Doll" and "Blue Line" all describe the disillusionment of the ignorant and hopeless girl's love, and the delicate and hazy mood of the girl is appropriate and moving: "The Hat House of Lilac Street" The midlife crisis is alleviated into a temporary escape and respite in the fantasy world, and the hat that is constantly woven is like a lost dream of life that is constantly searching; "The Dream of Naruto", "The Tongue with Magic", and "Blue Flower" all have complex hearts and regrets that have lost their hearts due to the desire for fame and fortune; and works such as "The Incredible Stationery Shop", "Snow Window", "The Forest of the White Parrot", "Crane House" and other works show the grief, depression and healing of death from different angles.
Naoko Ambo's collection of works introduced and published by the Children's Publishing House: "The Story of the Dusk Sea", "Song of the Wind and trees", "Flower Town", "The Forest of the White Parrot", "Distant Wild Rose Village", "Silver Peacock".
These subtle moods are concentrated in Anfang's pen, concentrated in a little or more tiny elements, like a brush smudge, slowly smearing a strange color, and penetrating into the reader's mind, bringing us also into the unique and characteristic Ofan": the illusion and reality in Anfang's works often lack obvious boundaries, like the opening and fading of ink on raw paper.
"Green Butterfly" draws on the techniques of Japanese weird novels, taking the flying green butterflies in the flowers under the May sunset as the growth point of fantasy, and when "I" am obsessed with the crazy pursuit of butterflies, the reader has inadvertently followed into the fantasy world. "Blue Thread" focuses on the blue woolen thread, expressing chiyo and Monday's obsessions and hallucinations with the action of weaving bibs and rolling drums, and magically connecting the similar fates of the two in different time and space. The "Fox's Window", "Thistle Field", "Autumn Wind Chimes", and "Naruto's Dream" respectively use the vast colors of flowers and plants, the illusion of light and shadow to generate and construct a fantasy world.
Illustration of Naoko Ambo's work "Until the Beans Are Cooked".
02
Open up the senses of the whole body and enrich the layers and textures of "micro"
Japanese design master Masayuki Kurokawa believes that "the 'micro' that Japanese people feel is related to the ability to perceive the aura of 'somatosensory' or 'full-body perception through the body'." In order to enrich the layers and textures of the "micro" smell, Anfang mobilizes multiple bodily senses to express subtle feelings and convey them to the reader as much as possible.
Readers familiar with Anfang's works know that her visual colors are very rich, and some researchers have divided her works into blue system, orange system, green system, pink system and so on according to the color image. Of course, as Ambo herself confessed, her favorite thing is still blue, so we can see a variety of blue things in her writing: blue plants, blue utensils, blue costumes, blue dyes, blue animals, and even a character's name is "blue". Most of the colors used in the house are colors with higher brightness, which are more likely to cause the reader's sense of dreaminess in the color combination.
In works such as "The Sound of Autumn", "Sound of the Wilderness", "Autumn Wind Chimes", "The Sound of Carnations", "Castanet", "Forest of Sound", "Telephone from the Sea", "Summer Dream" and other works, Ambo enriches the content around sound, or describes the subtle feelings produced by sound: "The sound of the stars in the sky ringing together", or expresses the special magic of sound: the sound of the gantrine can make the letter too tempted and captured by the plane tree; the old mistletoe tree imitates the sound of animals to make it lost. The description of taste and smell is mostly related to food: works such as "Daughter of The Orange Terrier", "Night of Sauce Radish" and "Tablecloth of the Moon Night" all focus on cooking and tasting the flavors of the mountains; "Hat House on Lilac Street" tastes rainbow sashimi as if "sucking on the memories of the past", which can also make the protagonist thirty years younger; "Tongue with Magic" focuses on a story about cooking and the true taste of life.
Naoko Ambo's collection of works introduced and published by Relay Publishing House: "Flower Field on Handkerchief", "Until the Flower Beans Are Cooked", "Roller Skates of the Wind", "The Secret of the Rabbit House", "The Guest of the Red Rose Hotel", and "Tenka".
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Anfang used to write in the kitchen: "grunting and stewing, writing at the same time". Sometimes the smell also evokes the character's emotional reverie, and in "Bear Fire" Komori smells the giant bear "emitting a nostalgic smell of hay", and in the conversation, he treats the bear as his father; in "Daughter of the Kirito Terrier", the carpenter Shinyoshi tastes the meal made by the new daughter-in-law and remembers the mother in the mountains.
Opening up the various senses of the whole body, or giving texture to the ethereal things through the senses, is a characteristic of the aesthetic feeling of The House. She often compares the sky to glass, the calm and loneliness to sitting on the bottom of the sea, the shadow of the flower can be worn on the chain as a talisman, the longing mood can be expressed by two taut blue lines, the sunset can have the sound of "唰, 唰, 唰", the moonlight can become a wet silk thread, the autumn wind chimes "remind me of the sound of the stars twinkling", the sound of the forest can be transformed into a terrible whirlpool, the color of the sea is a beautiful wordless song, mugwort balls dipped in sweet bean paste to eat the body will have the feeling that spring has come, And the lights overlooking the station in the mountains will make people want to cry. If Anfang is like a painter in the visual construction of mental images, he is more like a poet in the capture and refinement of aesthetic feelings.
Anfang once said: "I often want to write a work just for the sake of bringing a mental image to my mind one day, so that the eyes of others can see it vividly, just for this purpose." It is the rich aesthetic feelings presented by the aforementioned various senses that present the magical "mental image" that Anfang strives to depict in front of the reader in three dimensions, intuition and diversity, opening the door to the other world, so that we can truly experience the unique "smell" of The House.
Such a "smell" penetrates into the reader's heart through rich and subtle feelings, delicate and moving brushwork, wonderful imagination and unremitting excavation of the subtleties of human nature, delicately stirring our heartstrings: "Once it is sucked into the chest, it is impossible to say where it will be painful, and then, a certain instrument hidden somewhere in the body, suddenly, sobbed." The aftersound of this play is so long that readers who have finished reading Ambo's works tend to be immersed in a faint melancholy.
Not only that, under the harmony and guidance of the "micro" aesthetic, the fantasy environment and elements selected in Anfang's works also have a special "smell". Her fantasy stories often take place in the countryside, especially in mountain villages, even if a few non-rural situational works, rarely touch on the specific modern urban environment or complex interpersonal relationship descriptions, appearing to be rare and simple, and accompanied by the rural background fetish of Anfang, is a series of rural elements that appear frequently, such as rural plants and animals, rural natives, craftsmen, local delicacies, country songs, old talk, elves and ghosts, folk customs, gods and illusions, etc., these rural environments and elements create a long and mysterious atmosphere for the work , and created conditions and rationality for people to interact with (humanized) animals and plants, gods and monsters, and other miscellaneous places, and to create wonderful stories. Taken together, these can be called the "rural nature" of Anfang's works.
Anbo herself had lived in a mountain hut in Higashi-Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture for many years to write quietly, and perhaps that living environment nourished her keen feelings, enriched her imagination, and gave her more inspiration for writing, so she preferred to create the "rural nature" of her works. This "rurality" gives her the opportunity to calmly and delicately construct the fantasy world, to show those complex moods more subtly and shape the characters in the "fairy tale forest", and to give the work a classical atmosphere.
But beneath this superficially classical atmosphere are modern writing techniques and ideas. In terms of writing techniques, although Anfang borrowed some elements and bridges from classical fantasy stories, he has basically got rid of the narrative mode and language of traditional fantasy stories, and has also tried different narrative and techniques of writing: there is a first-person monologue structure, there is the intersection of illusion and reality, there is a rewriting and imitation of strange talk or past words, there are attempts to change a variety of different time and space switching connection methods, and so on.
The short story "Winter Girl" included in "The Tale of the Twilight Sea".
03
Pay attention to people's situation and subtle changes in people's hearts
Most crucially, her writing shifted from traditional fantasy works focusing on legend to daily life and legend, from focusing on plot to focusing on people. The human condition, the subtle changes in the human heart and the subtleties of human nature are the core of her concerns.
In her pen, there are almost no protagonists who have a complete and happy life, and they always have such shortcomings, pains, knots, meanness and dissatisfaction: the protagonists of works such as "The Fox's Window", "Snow Window", "Naruto's Dream" and so on have lost their loved ones, the protagonists in "Birds and Roses" and "The Rocking Chair of the Sky Color" have physical deficiencies or defects, and the protagonists in "Distant Wild Rose Village", "The Sound of Autumn", and "Yellow Scarf" have old age and loneliness living alone. And most of them are relatively marginalized in the group, as Ambo says: her fairy tale forest "lives in almost all lonely, pure, clumsy and unsophisticated things." ”
The "micro" aesthetic of Anfang is the aesthetic of the situation of these deformed people and the subtle changes in the heart, the aesthetics of the exploration of subtle human nature, and the multi-sensory subtle feelings and sensory openings that she strives to mobilize are also to guide the reader into the world of real human nature, and to get closer to and understand those "lonely, pure, clumsy and not good at dealing with the world".
Illustration of Naoko Aba's work "Giant Deer".
She can express the tragedy of simple people turning away from their nature through the attitude of red rice bowls and food in "Daughter of the Orange Terrier", and turning over more hopeless love through the contrast between childhood play and adult changes in "Pepper Doll". The regret of "Naruto's Dream" for losing people because of things is compensated in the fire that seems to be real. "Silver Peacock" uses the weaving of two colors of peacock motifs to metaphorically depict the conflict and tragedy of ideas between the stubborn old man and the young man who hopes to go to a new world. In "The Hat House of Lilac Street", the protagonist's youthful reminiscences and sighs in the lilac light reflect the powerlessness, boredom and helplessness of the real middle-aged people. In "Yellow Scarf", the old man is both eager to live freely and subject to self-concepts and the eyes of others, and his inner conflict focuses on the wearing of the yellow scarf, and finally breaks through the barrier of the heart under the call of the yellow scarf. "Blue Thread" uses the weaving and turning of wool to show the subtle changes in the emotions of the characters and the understanding and attraction of two deformed zeros with different fates across time and space.
Therefore, Anfang's "micro" aesthetic is an artistic way of caring for subtle human nature, as she herself puts it, the dark fairy tale forest that always blows through the wind, "like moonlight, there is often a faint light coming in, and you can vaguely see what is inside." She is so gentle that she is afraid of alarming the "micro" artistic atmosphere, and she wants to lead the reader carefully to explore those lonely, fragile and damaged "things". Because those things also have a little shadow of the house itself, a piece of soul - the dark place to show itself is always difficult and hesitant.
04
Complete the healing of the self in the fantasy world
When he was one year old, he was adopted by his aunt as an adopted daughter, and he did not know his origin until very late, and his childhood was almost always spent in the transfer school due to his father's work, his personality was relatively introverted, and he was not good at sports in the Japanese school environment where sports was particularly important (the small girl in "The Bird and the Rose" was self-mapping), and the above intertwined, causing a great sense of uneasiness and lack of belonging to Anfang's heart, so that Anfang's personality always had a lonely, sad, and even closed trait. Therefore, The healing of Ambo's characters in the fantasy world is actually the healing of the self, and the gentle breath is also the care of the self-wounded heart, and her fantasy works are actually an artistic way to open up to reality.
Therefore, Anfang is always sympathetic and compassionate to his characters, and the plot rarely appears in the dramatic structure of good and evil, fierce conflict, and doomed ending in classical works, focusing more on inner hesitation or loss of soul. There is no desperate struggle, no absolute anti-angle, "mourning but not hurting, happy and not obscene", and it seems that those who make mistakes and infringers cannot bear to be harsh, and even demons and ghosts have become cute: the smell of Anfang's works is "soft" and "gentle".
The short story "The Fire of the Bear" is included in "Silver Peacock".
The hunter in "The Fox's Window" was originally planning to kill the fox, but unconsciously became the fox's guest, obviously has recognized the little fox's illusion of the clerk, but the mood turned to "the tea is poured, do not dye something, and can not live with people"; the giant bear in "Bear Fire" confessed that when he was hungry, "maybe he would eat people", but humorously recognized Komori's pretending to die, its fur warmth, tobacco smell and easy-going attitude, appeased the protagonist who was left behind by his companions, and even produced the illusion of a father who could be relied on. The old turtle who imprisoned the girl in her dream realized that she had done something bad and was touched by Ryota's sincerity, and sacrificed a hundred years of life to complete a pair of lovers; raindrops the baby did not destroy the village of resentment because of the sugar sent by the girl.
Even her frequent deaths are not so frightening and sad: similar to the depiction of Mogi falling into a deep well and feeling like flying into the sky in a jelly-like blue at the time of death, Ambo treats death as light and dreamlike in works such as "The Incredible Stationery Shop", "Snow Window", "The Forest of the White Parrot", and "Crane House", which are centered on death and its pain.
Masayuki Kurokawa analyzes the concept of "micro", one of the key words of Japanese aesthetics, that is, "the whole is reflected in the details": "There is everything in time in 'now', everything in space 'here', and everything in the 'individual' that has people." And pointed out: "To want to know what man is, it is impossible to see from the outside of oneself, and only by digging deep inside oneself can we see the essence of 'man'." I think this may be where Anfang's works touch readers of different times, regions, ages and identities, because Anfang's excavation of the subtle inner heart of the literary "individual" also reflects the soul of everyone in reality; from those "lonely, pure, clumsy and not good at dealing with the world", readers also see the dark and secret side of their own inner confusion, fragility, damage, entanglement, etc., thus producing sadness and resonance.
Readers will be grateful that The House did not use hot sunlight to expose this side, but sprinkled the "dark forest" with gentle and peaceful moonlight. This moonlight is not only the unique breath of soothing the soul emitted by the work, but also another world dimension opened by Ambro with fantasy, where both growing children and adults who are eroded by life can get comfort, compensation and healing from it, give us love, courage and hope, and once again have the strength to face reality, like a small girl who escaped from the magical garden, becoming "as beautiful as a rose, as bright as a bird".