The Whale that Fell in Love with a Submarine

An interesting collection of short stories. These are not cheery stories for children - far from it - these are dark. But they create a stunning call for peace.

Truly beautiful stories that show the best of humanity and the worst of humanity both at the same time. From kamikaze pilots, to innocent civilians trying to shelter from bombs, both sides of the horrors of war are told here, and to heart-breaking effect.
Why did I only give it 4 stars? Because I felt some of the stories were just too harrowing for children. So many of the stories end in horrible deaths, that the book haunted me long after I'd put it down, and I'm a grown adult! I remember how seeing the TV movie "Threads" about a nuclear war in the UK haunted my teen years, and how I wished I'd been older when I'd seen it, and I got the same creeping sense of horror and sadness when reading these stories. While I appreciate that war rarely leads to many happy endings, the sadness in this series of short stories is pretty relentless.
A beautiful book, nonetheless. Highly recommended if you're strong of heart!

The Whale that Fell in Love with a Submarine by Akiyuki Nosaka is a series of short stories set in war torn Japan on August 15, 1945. The dreamlike quality of the writing makes the tragedy of war and death a surreal experience, from the first story of the oversized, lonely whale who falls in love with a submarine and ends up sacrificing itself to save his love during a submarine attack, to the story of the dying wolf who uses her last breaths to save an abandoned, sickly child. The stories are devastating, and the author does a commendable job capturing the confusion of children and animals - the innocent victims - who search for reason behind an atrocious, traumatizing war. I would recommend this to an older middle grade audience, particularly those who desire a different perspective about the human toll resulting from World War II.

The book contains seven short stories which are all set on the 15th of August 1945, the day Japan surrendered in WW II.
The stories are told in the style of children's fables and often an animal plays a mayor part in them (whale, parrot, she-wolf, cockroach). The language is clear and often even poetic, but happy tales they are not. War is cruel and it's the innocent children who suffer the most. In this stories children die, suffer, starve to death. These are stories which make you think, which will linger with you for a long time and which also offer a good glimpse into life in Japan during the second World War and the Japanese way of thinking, where it's a disgrace to be a POW and a great honour to kill yourself as a kamikaze bomber.

The Whale That Fell in Love with a Submarine is the story of a whale, who has problems finding a female partner as he is too big in size for his species, the sardine whales. He lives a lonely life, until he happens to come across a Japanese submarine, where the crew has just heard the news, that the war is over, but they aren't sure if they should believe it or if they are just tricked by the enemy.
They decide to not give up fighting in any case, when the whale starts to basically rock the boat, showing his affection, for what he believes is a female whale and hopefully the love of his life.
Their close encounter is disturbed by the arrival of American warships and when the attack towards the submarine is launched, the whale doesn't want to leave his partner and tries to protect "her".
It doesn't end well for the poor whale, but his sacrifice wasn't in vain, it leads to an interesting shift in thought aboard the submarine.

In The Parrot and the Boy, an eight year old child tries to survive by itself in an air raid shelter at the foothills of the mountains. The only company he has, is his pet parrot, who can speak. He has already been hiding since a couple of weeks night and day in the shelter and why he is there all alone is heart breaking, as is the end of the story.

The Mother that Turned into a Kite is the story, which touched me the most and which I will remember for some time to come. A mother tries to save her child from burning to death, after their way to the air raid shelter is cut off by scorching flames, following the bombardment of their town. The end is sad and poetic, both at the same time.

The Old She-Wolf and the Little Girl. Here a mother has to leave her young daughter behind, fleeing from their town. The child suffers from measels and the group is afraid, that she might give it to all of the other children. The mother, who has two young boys to consider, too, assumes, that her daughter won't survive the high fever and puts her into a basket with some food, then places her in the long grass. There the girl is found by an elderly she-wolf soon after and the two found an unlikely bond. Again it doesn't end all smiles.

The Red Dragonfly and the Cockroach is the story of a young kamikaze bomber pilot, who loses directions over the ocean on his way to commit suicide in order to attack the enemy and has to perform an emergency landing on an island. Main reason for the landing is his unlikely friend, a pet cockroach, which he took with him and now deeply regrets his decision, as he would prefer for the animal to survive, instead of having to die, too.

The Prisoner of War and the Little Girl is the tale of an American POW, who escaped during a bombing from the prison camp and has made his way to the air raid shelters up at the hillside. There he has taken refuge. After some days a six or seven year old Japanese girl turns up, who has lost both her parents and the two become friends and hide in the selter until the war is over. The end of the story is excellent, as it shows, that the official end ot the war is just the beginning of a long process to trust each other again.

The last story The Cake Tree in the Ruins made me actually smile and here we have a happy ending, at least for some children in the story.
A group of starving children discovers a mysterious tree in the burned out ruins of the town. They find out, that the twigs ot the tree are edible and taste delicious and they regrow, which means they will always find something to eat. The tree is a Baumkuchen tree. Baumkuchen (tree cake) is a German cake, where layer upon layer is heated up and finally the whole thing is covered in chocolate. It's usually a Christmas treat in certain regions of Germany and I love to eat the stuff.

Overall the book contains a set of excellent stories, which are a combination of war literature and children's fables. As the most of them are very dark with sad endings where often children die, they aren't stories for young kids. They are more suitable for older children and teens, where WW II is subject during history lessons.
The award-winning author, Akiyuki Nosaka, knows, sadly, very well, what he's writing about, his adoptive parents were killed in the bombing of Kobe, Japan in 1945 and just 14 years old he fled with his younger sister to an evacuation camp, where she died of starvation.
Mika Provata-Carlone's illustrations are wonderful black and white drawings and they tie in perfectly.

ARC Review: The Whale that Fell in Love with a Submarine by Akiyuki Nosaka

These stories are all very surreal, which didn't surprise me. In fact, that's kind of what I was hoping for.

I'm not really sure how to review them beyond saying I found them all very well written, kind of haunting, illustrating the best and/or the worst of humanity in difficult and dangerous times.

I'm not really sure what else to say...

I really liked all of these stories, very well written and thought provoking.

Out of extraordinary times comes extraordinary literature, and that's certainly the case with this book of fable-type Japanese short stories. They all centre around VJ Day – the submission by the Emperor of Japan to finally end WWII – and do so with galling, shocking, powerfully emotional and emotive darkness. At first we get something twee – a large whale that we are told is just too off-puttingly buy for the female of his species, even if they are regularly larger. He seems to find a mate in a submarine, but that's not the end of the story. A young lad and his parrot, which had constantly been a quite unworkable memento of his father, live alone in an air raid shelter. A mother harbours her son in the middle of a fire-storm – yes, I did imply the tweeness ran out. This story, certainly, is hard-hitting enough for the adult reader, let alone the traumatised youth the book seeks to target.

The fourth story is equally bare and forthright about the destruction about the world – a dying wolf meets a young girl abandoned on a route march, and you realise nothing is being hidden from the audience, by any fashion or technique – the way the different animals all look up and see aeroplanes above them, and not some idea of what animals would assume them to be, is a case in point. We get a blunt and firm resolution to each tale – as well as to that age-old quandary, what would survive a war better – a cockroach, or a kamikaze pilot? Only towards the end do we get a sustained period of happiness – in contrast to the life of a POW, and ultimately a child's eye view that for once doesn't make us fear for the dreariness of our lot.

These stories are pretty much superb – tightly written, if fond of overly-long flashback sequences now and again, vivid and evocative, and I guess burning with quite a fierce moral, even from the Japanese eye view of the victim. They've been well presented, as usual, by Pushkin Press, although I really didn't take to the pictures that added nothing. They certainly amount to a strong work together and apart, and combine to create a book the likes of which you won't have read before.

This book is surreal and devastating. Even though it's very short, it took me many months to read as I needed to have a break after each story. I loved it.

'The Whale That Fell In Love With A Submarine' by Akiyuki Nosaka with translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori and illustrations by Mika Provata-Carlone is a collection of stories for children from a period of time at the end of World War II. These are stories of the bad things that can happen to children during wartime, so, reader, be warned.

The stories are all dated the 15th of August 1945, which is when Japan surrendered. The title story is about a whale that courts a submarine. The sailors tie their farewell notes to the whale, but the whale is never able to deliver them. In one story, a boy left in a bomb shelter discovers that his mother has turned into a kite. In another, a wolf takes in an abandoned child.

In all, things are bleak. There are bombed out cities, and not enough food. In come cases, the children have never had sweets because of rationing. In all cases, the children find something whimsical in their environs, but this is usually before bad things happen.

Children understand that bad things can happen, but whether these stories are right to read to your child is going to be your call. The themes are somber and nothing really funny or happy happens. The illustrations are sparsely drawn, but fit the story really well. I'm glad I got to read this story.

I received a review copy of this ebook from Pushkin Children's Books and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this ebook.