TSUNAMI! by Kimiko Kajikawa and Ed Young, ill. Philomel, February 2009, 32p., ISBN: 978-0-399-25006-4
"And when my soul comes to rescue me
I rest my resistance, fall piece by piece into peace
And slip like the water back into the sea"
-- Edie Brickell, "This Eye"
Those first moments of approaching the ocean after not having been swimming in it for a couple of years had me feeling a momentary tinge of shyness toward it. There is that sense of enormity and foreverness and hidden secrets. But then it reached out and splashed my ankles and knees and -- proceeding forward -- I was suddenly and thoroughly immersed in it, swimming beyond the breakers, and it was my old friend, holding me aloft with its buoyant, salty density. All of those feelings and memories embedded so deeply in me came pouring out: of being a little kid all scratchy with sand in the backseat of an ancient station wagon heading home with New York Top Forty on the radio, still feeling, for hours to come and into that night's sleep, the never-ending sway and tug of the sea bouncing me around and around despite its having -- for the moment -- receded out of sight and scent to be replaced by the moist and verdant midsummer's evening of fireflies and hide-and-seek and a warm shower and soft pajamas.
A week ago I was one with the ocean, thousands of miles from where I sit this morning. I left my beloved soulmate back there, and wish in all of my being that I was there right now.
I consider it one of the most fortunate circumstances of birth that I was born near the sea and, throughout childhood, accumulated so many layers of sweet memories of being in it, memories that cause me to find myself back at the shores of eastern Long Island again and again just as surely as if I were a bird born with that instinctual knowledge of where one is forever compelled to return to.
Long before reading Pearl Buck's THE BIG WAVE for a junior high English class, I'd had powerful, reoccurring dreams of the sea pulling way out, revealing the naked ocean floor, and then crashing furiously back in to shore. Reading THE BIG WAVE merely accentuated those dreams.
To look at the stunning cover of TSUNAMI!, the powerful image of a debris-bespeckled gigantic wave about to crash down, is to understand why this book so thoroughly and unceasingly calls to me after having spent recent days and all those long-ago days in and along the ocean. I've now been sitting here staring at Ed Young's amazing cover art for a ridiculous number of minutes.
TSUNAMI! is adapted from a 1897 story "A Living God" by Lafcadio Hearn. It is the tale of Ojiisan (meaning grandfather), a wise old rice farmer who lived on a mountainside near the sea, a man who lives simply despite being the oldest and wealthiest person in his village. Ojiisan has a premonition that causes him to pass up a village celebration and, sure enough, an earthquake occurs. Then the sea recedes and the villagers run in wonderment to the beach and even beyond it to watch the sea. Knowing they are in immanent danger, but being too far away to call them back, Ojiisan brings all of the villagers running up the hill by setting fire to his rice crop, purposely and selflessly destroying his life's fortune for the sake of saving his neighbors.
"Through the twilight, a dark shadow grew larger and larger, racing toward the coast. The long darkness was the returning se, as high as a cliff and as wide as the sky, heading for the village with lightning speed."
Caldecott Medalist Ed Young is at his best here; his work is a truly inspired artistic achievement rendered through utilizing combinations of gouache, pastel, and collage to vividly bring the ocean, the village, and the fire all to life.
TSUNAMI! is powerful and notable in its lesson of what one person can do to change the world and in its images which so thoroughly and successfully capture the elemental forces of our world.
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