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Summary
Summary
In dreamlike sequences, a man symbolically confronts the trauma of his family's incarceration in the Japanese internment camps during World War II. This infamous event is made emotionally clear through his meeting a group of children all with strange name tags pinned to their coats. The man feels the helplessness of the children. Finally, desperately he releases the name tags like birds into the air to find their way home with the hope for a time when Americans will be seen as one people--not judged, mistrusted, or segregated because of their individual heritage.
Sixty years after thousands of Japanese Americans were unjustly imprisoned, the cogent prose and haunting paintings of renowned author and illustrator Allen Say remind readers of a dark chapter in America's history.
Author Notes
Allen Say was born in 1937 in Yokohama, Japan and grew up during the war, attending seven different primary schools amidst the ravages of falling bombs. His parents divorced in the wake of the end of the war and he moved in with his maternal grandmother, with whom he did not get along with. She eventually let him move into a one room apartment, and Say began to make his dream of being a cartoonist a reality. He was twelve years old.
Say sought out his favorite cartoonist, Noro Shinpei, and begged him to take him on as an apprentice. He spent four years with Shinpei, but at the age of 16 moved to the United States with his father. Say was sent to a military school in Southern California but then expelled a year later. He struck out to see California with a suitcase and twenty dollars. He moved from job to job, city to city, school to school, painting along the way, and finally settled on advertising photography and prospered. Say's first children's book was done in his photo studio, between shooting assignments. It was called "The Ink-Keeper's Apprentice" and was the story of his life with Noro Shinpei. After this, he began to illustrate his own picture books, with writing and illustrating becoming a sort of hobby. While illustrating "The Boy of the Three-year Nap" though, Say suddenly remembered the intense joy I knew as a boy in my master's studio and decided to pursue writing and illustrating full time.
Say began publishing books for children in 1968. His early work, consisting mainly of pen-and-ink illustrations for Japanese folktales, was generally well received; however, true success came in 1982 with the publication of The Bicycle Man, based on an incident in Say's life. "The Boy of the Three-Year Nap" published in 1988, and written by Dianne Snyder, was selected as a 1989 Caldecott Honor Book and winner of The Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for best picture book.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 4 Up-While Say strives to call attention to the plight of Japanese-Americans unjustly interred in camps during World War II, this enigmatic picture book may serve only to confuse. A man embarks on a kayak trip, loses his boat and gear in churning rapids, and ends up in a cave. He emerges in a desert where he encounters two girls wearing name tags who are "Waiting to go home." The three struggle through the wind-swept desert to what they believe is a town, but in reality is a row of wooden, tar-papered buildings. There the horrified man stares through a window to find nothing but a tag with his name on it, while outside a large group of children chant, "Take us home!" Bellowing loudspeakers send the children scampering away, leaving behind a tag bearing the name of the man's mother. The weary traveler climbs back down into the cave and falls asleep. When he awakens, he and a different group of children watch as the wind sends name tags lying on the ground flying into the air. The man releases the two tags he has found as well. Say's large, realistic watercolors bordered in white appear to the right of each page of text. The desert scenes are rendered in gray and sepia tones and aptly convey the starkness of the surroundings. The cover picture in which the man and girls appear as tiny figures before an endless row of barracks and immense mountains emphasizes their powerlessness. Pictures of the empty buildings and the children, their mouths rounded in pleas for "home," are particularly chilling. The released tags at the end offer some hopeful light, but readers will need help finding their way through this dark, puzzling journey.-Marianne Saccardi, Norwalk Community College, CT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Breaking from such previous works as Tea with Milk and Grandfather's Journey, which featured a realistic sequence of events, Caldecott Medalist Say here enters the realm of dream or rather, nightmare. The opening image shows a man dwarfed by an ominous, craggy stone edifice at the edge of a shore, as he prepares to step into his kayak. In the next spread, the man, wearing a red helmet and vest that match his vessel, hurls over a waterfall; the sky resembles billowing black smoke that blends with the rocky cliffs ("The man closed his eyes and held his breath"). Say's use of light and dark has a haunting effect, as the man first surfaces in an underground tunnel with a faint glimmer of sunlight; the light then shifts from horizontal to vertical as it illuminates a ladder. Barren land awaits above, with a single structure: "Must be an Indian reservation, he thought." Two children sit against an adobe ruin with nametags around their necks, explaining they are "from the camp." Details in the meticulously rendered watercolors reveal that the children are referring to an internment camp: a row of abandoned identical wooden houses sit on the desert floor of a valley (and hark back to the deserted Indian reservation); thousands of children with identical tags chant "Take us home!"; searchlights from high watchtowers follow them as they flee. Other details link the hero's fate with theirs, but the final image is uplifting. Much remains enigmatic: most children will require the aid of an older reader to make sense of the historical context, and may be put off by the dark and lonely vistas. However, the images create an internal logic of their own, as emotionally convincing as any waking experience. All ages. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
Beyond the fact of its setting in an internment camp for Japanese Americans, little about this ponderous picture book fable is clear. A kayaking man finds two children wearing ID tags, but the internment camp they've come from appears abandoned. Perhaps all three are figures in a ghostly shifting of time, memory, and conscience. If the pictures fail to shed life on the story, they are often in themselves sparely poignant scenes of lost children. From HORN BOOK Fall 2002, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Say (The Sign Painter, 2000, etc.) takes readers on a very personal and perplexing journey in this latest outing, melding together, in dream and nightmare-like fashion, the past, present, and future. This non-linear, fantasy story-within-a-story begins in present day with a man setting off in his kayak and being carried over an enormous waterfall. Here, minus kayak and equipment, he finds himself in a cave at the foot of a ladder, which leads him to the desert above. At this point, Say establishes a Native American connection-an Indian reservation. But then, finding two lost children who are unable to tell him where their home is, he leads them toward the lights of an internment camp that is both present-day deserted and in full WWII use. At the camp, the man finds an ID tag with his own name on it, and a large group of Japanese-American children chanting, "Take us home." Searchlights from two watchtowers scan the group and everyone runs. In the next painting, the man appears beside a Pueblo kiva. He climbs down another ladder and falls asleep. The children he sees when he wakes are Native American, not Japanese; those children have gone home. In this cryptic story, which relies on both words and pictures, Say exhibits a political tone not seen in his previous work. He explores difficult pieces of US history (Indian reservations, Japanese internment camps), making a tenuous, but powerful, connection, and focusing on the sadness and bewilderment of the children. Adults and families are absent here. The images are photographic and hauntingly beautiful, but the symbolism is not always clear, especially for a child reader who lacks historical context. While providing much to speculate on, this will probably find its rightful audience with teens and adults. (author's note) (Picture book. 10+)
Booklist Review
Gr. 5-8. This picture book for older readers starts as a classic time-travel adventure: a young man hurtles down the rapids in a kayak, is swept into an underground river, and emerges to find himself in the desert, near what he thinks is a ruined Indian reservation. He meets children with name tags, Japanese Americans like himself, who live in an internment camp, and he finds his own name tag there. "Take us home!" the children cry, but thundering voices and blinding lights shoot from the watchtower. The young man returns to his kayak and finds contemporary children there with name tags like his, which they scatter over the mountains. The watercolor paintings are spellbinding, evoking the desert and mountains of Ansel Adams' photos and also the edgy close-ups of the surrealist painters. But what does it all mean? Is the wild journey a metaphor for how it felt to be suddenly swept away to the camps? Who are the children at the end? What do their tags mean? Say is just too elliptical this time--and yet he does pose troubling questions about the West as the land of the free and the home of the brave. --Hazel Rochman
