Singing Shijimi Clams

Children's Literature - Ken Marantz

A witch who is no longer young, mean, or feisty, lives quietly and not very happily with her cat companion, Toraji. When she brings home some shijimi clams for dinner one night and prepares to cook them, she notices them peacefully asleep and snoring. Although she and Toraji are hungry, she just cannot disturb them. Soup that night is without clams. Each night thereafter, she ends up letting them sleep. At first, Toraji is impatient with her, but soon he cannot kill them either. One night, the clams awake and begin to cry. The witch promises to take them back home, but there is no money for train tickets. How they raise the money, return the clams, and live happily ever after makes an unexpected end to this quietly charming, delightful tale. The visual story is told with gentle, delicate black line drawings. Naturalistic, the pictures depict our spare heroine with flaring hair and wire-rimmed glasses, along with the many expressions of her rather chubby cat. Contextual details of kitchen and bedroom supply just enough for a realistic setting. The clams, drawn as faces with open "mouths," take on a personality all their own.

Kirkus Reviews

Told and illustrated with equal spareness, this tender Japanese tale will please young readers who find the fate of the oysters in "The Walrus and the Carpenter" discomfiting. Having left her "mean and feisty" years behind, an old witch not only can't bring herself to pour the bagful of small, gently snoring clams she's brought home into her boiling miso soup, but when they wake and begin to cry, she offers to take them back to the shore. Buying train tickets for so many, however, seems impossible-until the clams begin to sing "with pretty little voices, like tiny popping bubbles," charming enough contributions from passersby to finance the trip. By the end not, only have the faces that Kojima puts on the clam shells in her tiny, delicate line drawings gone from dismay to delight, but the habitual frowns on the witch and her bad-tempered cat have likewise changed to smiles. All live happily ever after on the beach, "surrounded by the pretty voices of the clams, the gentle sound of the waves, and the warmth of the sun." A feel-good episode if ever there was one. (Picture book. 6-8)