The Cake Tree in the Ruins
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Intensely moving stories that tell of the absurd violence of war, and tenderly depict the animals and children caught in its vortex.
In 1945, Akiyuki Nosaka watched the Allied firebombing of Kobe kill his adoptive parents, and then witnessed his sister starving to death. The shocking and blisteringly memorable stories of The Cake Tree in the Ruins are based on his own experiences as a child in Japan during the Second World War.
They are stories of a lonely whale searching the oceans for a mate, who sacrifices himself for love; of a mother desperately trying to save her son with her tears; of a huge, magnificent tree which grows amid the ruins of a burnt-out town, its branches made from the sweetest cake imaginable.
Profound, heartbreaking and aglow with a piercing beauty, they express the chaos and terror of conflict, yet also how love can illuminate even the darkest moment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This volume is a series of delicate, tragic stories by the late Nosaka (author of the short story "Grave of the Fireflies," which was adapted into a classic animated film) set during August of 1945, when American B-52 bombers had devastated Japan. Reminiscent of the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, sketches such as "The Whale That Fell in Love with a Submarine" mix flights of fancy with martial horror. "The Parrot and the Boy" is the story of a boy and his prize pet eking out survival in an air-raid shelter. "The Elephant and Its Keeper" transpires in a forgotten zoo. "The Prisoner of War and the Little Girl" tells the heart-wrenching tale of an unlikely friendship disrupted by wartime. "The Old She-Wolf and the Little Girl" is a fable about a dying wolf who finds a new lease on life by caring for a lost child. The bittersweet title story follows a group of children frolicking in a bomb-blasted ruin. Other works, such as "The Red Dragonfly and the Cockroach," which follows a doomed pilot, and "A Soldier's Family," about an isolated Japanese officer, are brilliant war stories in their own right. This excellent collection proves that Nosaka (1930 2015) was a master of the form.
