I Don’t Want To! by Keiko Sena
My rating: 5/5 cats
another exceptional package from brian and chizuru, as he learns japanese through the children’s books of his new home!
every time i find one of these envelopes in my mailbox, i get crazy-excited because not only are the books themselves weird and adorable, but brian’s translations are these spectacular and digressive and charming personal journeys he chooses to share with me, making them utterly priceless.
the latest package contained this book and Balloon Cat; two books i’d mentioned as sounding intriguing to me after he sent Don’t Want To Go To Bed? and There Is No Ghost by the same author.
and they did not disappoint!
this features a little girl named rumiko (or ruru) who does not want to.
what doesn’t she want to do??
she’s unspecific. brian’s translation is, “I don’t wanna! I don’t wanna—I don’t wanna do ANYTHING!”
which seems a pretty bleak stance for a little girl to take.
and ruru’s world is about to get a whole lot darker. literally.
because her mom’s not taking any of ruru’s quitter shit, and she comes back with an equally bratty retort that SHE doesn’t wanna do anything, either.
although she gets more specific than ruru:
harsh, right? but it doesn’t end there! now even ruru’s food is getting into this tantrum:
but, i mean—how jazzed is food to be eaten by anyone, really, “evil” or not?
in any event, her food takes off
and then THE SUN steps up and yells “I don’t wanna!”
and hides behind a cloud and makes rain, grumpily.
because kids—this is where rain comes from.
could be worse, i suppose.
brian makes an excellent point:
and then ruru’s shoes and teddy bear…yup, they don’t wanna either. again, it’s unclear what they don’t wanna do, but i assume the shoes don’t want stinky feet shoved in them before they’re dragged over sharp pebbles and discarded bubble gum, which again seems like a reasonable position and not necessarily a tantrum. the teddy bear…i’m not sure what it is he does/is now refusing to do, but make no mistake, he does not wanna.
and ruru is left crying,
with this bullying question from some unidentified omniscient narrator:
and that is the last page! presumably, the ambiguity is intended to give the message time to sink in and the child listening to the story is expected to ruminate on the consequences of stubbornness, but as brian astutely points out:
a chilling conclusion sure to lead many children down the dark path to insomnia.
truth be told, i myself frequently don’t wanna. i even have this pillow, which has seen better days, and if it could talk, it would probably say “don’t wanna”:
thank you so much, brian!
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