Résumé
Résumé de Un garçon japonais
À qui s’adresse-t-il ?
For readers who love everyday life in another time and place, food and festivals, family warmth, and a narrator who talks to you like a friend across the table.
De quoi parle ce livre ?
A Japanese Boy is a memoir of childhood by Shiukichi Shigemi, written in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1889. The author was a young Japanese student in America who wanted to earn money to continue his studies. He also noticed that no American book told a Japanese boy's life in a boy's own words. So he wrote one in English, a language whose alphabet he had learned only a few years before.
He grew up in Imabari, a small seaport on the western coast of Shikoku, while Japan was moving from feudal rule toward Western schools and ideas. In this summary you meet his grandfather by the kotatsu, his teachers, his sisters and their dances, a kind neighbor called Aunt Otsune, and a dog named Gem. You learn how rice was cooked, how a town bathed, and how a boy built a kite. Each scene is told with warmth, a gentle joke and a good eye for detail. Let us begin with the town itself, its harbor and its streets.
Dans ce résumé
- 1A seaport town shapes a boy's worldFree
- 2School teaches penmanship, numbers and respect
- 3Home life is warm, busy and ruled by custom
- 4Theaters, wrestlers and a castle with a dark past
- 5A father's calm, a mother's care, a neighbor's kindness
- 6A year of festivals fills the boy's memory
Point clé 1 sur 6
A seaport town shapes a boy's world
Shigemi starts with the place. Imabari lies on Shikoku, and its harbor is a shallow ditch where people wade across at low tide and dig for clams. Junks bring rice, and grain merchants push a sharpened bamboo tube into the sacks, chew a few grains, and name the province they came from. Laborers with iron hooks carry the sacks to the warehouses.
Nearby stands a bathing resort inside a man-made stone cave, heated by wood fires. Patients sit on the scorching floor and then run to the sea, supposedly to cook illness out of the body. The boy went with his mother and liked it very little. Mount Myozin is not a remarkable peak, but he feels at home whenever he sees it on his return. The town has no steeple and no pagoda, because it is too poor to build one.
The streets are narrow, with no sidewalks, so people and animals share the same path. He compares this with New York, where the captain in charge of him had to pull him out of the way of draft horses and wagons. Blacksmiths, granite workers, temples and fishmongers each have their own street. Japanese people live in their shops, and every family has a home of its own, however poor. His father kept a store on the second block of the main street.
Behind the shop lives his grandfather in an inkyo, the quiet cottage where an old man is cared for by his son-in-law. Grandfather reads, thinks and walks with a bamboo cane. On winter days the boy sits with him by the kotatsu, hands and feet under the quilt, begging for stories. In that little house he sets up a clay shrine to Tenjinsan, the god of penmanship, with sake in tiny bottles and a lamp every night. His family is so pleased that they buy him a toy temple, and his devotion grows tenfold.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
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Questions about Un garçon japonais
What is A Japanese Boy about?
It is a memoir of boyhood in Imabari, a seaport on Shikoku. The author describes school, home, food, baths, theaters, festivals, games and family, showing how an ordinary Japanese boy lived as old customs gave way to new ones.
Who wrote A Japanese Boy and why?
Shiukichi Shigemi wrote it in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1889. He wanted American readers to hear a Japanese boy's life told by a Japanese boy, and he hoped the book would help pay for his continuing studies.
Is A Japanese Boy a true story?
Yes, it is an autobiographical account of the author's own childhood, though it focuses on customs common to many boys. Names such as Mr. Gladness and Miss Chrysanthemum are English renderings of Japanese names.
What are the kotatsu, soroban and mochi in the book?
A kotatsu is a floor heater under a quilt. A soroban is a bead frame used for arithmetic. Mochi are glutinous rice cakes pounded at New Year. The author explains each one as he goes along.
Is A Japanese Boy easy to read?
It is approachable. The chapters are short and lively, each built around a scene like a kite flight, a festival or a visit to the bath, and the narrator speaks to you in a friendly voice.