The Bear Minimum

Otherwise that wouldn’t have happened!

In this case, I happened upon a book of bed time stories from my childhood. One of the stories is about an old Japanese man who lived on a mountain. He was poor, but loved his garden, so he would traipse all over the mountain digging up plants to put in his garden. People would come from far and wide to see this garden, and the old man was happy.

One day the old man noticed an old brass kettle in the corner of his room. Now, this wasn’t his, and it looked very old, but his own kettle was so well-used it was cracked and starting to leak. The old man took the kettle and popped it on the fire to heat up some water.

Then the kettle started to change shape. The handle turned into a head, and the spout a tail. Four legs sprouted out of the bottom, and then, running madly around the old man’s house, was a tanuki.

Now, that’s not a creature many will be familiar with, but it sort of looks like a raccoon or a dog, and in Japan there’s a great deal of myth surrounding them which says the tanuki have the power to transform themselves into anything they like. This is the tanuki, and this here is what the illustrator had in the pictures. That’s right, that’s a badger. In a story about a magical tankuki.

Now, I understand this book was written and illustrated long, long before the days of the internet, and how many encyclopaedias would have a picture of a unusual Japanese mammal even if they did include an entry on the creature? So I do not begrudge the illustrator, but I do still think it rather hilarious.