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Musings: Drawing on the Walls: The Boy Who Drew Cats

The Boy Who Drew Cats adapted by Lafcadio Hearn and Margaret Hodges, and illustrated by Aki Sogabe

Holiday House, 2002

ISBN-13: 978-0823415946

Available:  Used hardcover and paperback, Audible audiobook

 

I had a reader request the name of a book about a little boy drawing all over the walls. The classic story about a boy drawing himself into a story is Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson, but that didn’t seem quite right. I finally remembered a Japanese folktale about a boy who drew all over the walls of a temple and drove a demon away, and was able to find what I think is really the answer to this question; it’s a story called “The Boy Who Drew Cats”, and it has been adapted and illustrated many times. The copy pictured above was adapted by Lafcadio Hearn and Margaret Hodges, and illustrated by Aki Sogabe, but there are MANY other versions.

The story follows a young man who is obsessed with drawing cats; he draws only cats, but he draws them amazingly well. Forced to leave home to find a trade, he spends the night in an abandoned temple, with empty screens all around, just begging to be painted with cats. After painting the walls, the boy falls asleep, waking in the night to hear a tremendous fight. In the morning, he discovers a terrible rat demon, dead, and notices the cats on the screens are not in the same positions he had painted them in. His cats have defeated the monster and saved his life, revealing his artistic ability and enabling him to become a professional artist.

Walls can be the source of creativity, as they are in the nonfiction picture book Painting for Peace in Ferguson, a story about the creative approach the community of Ferguson took to beautify  and inspire neighborhoods where the buildings had been boarded up or defaced following demonstrations against police brutality that turned violent. They can become a personification of insanity or paranoia, as they are in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, in which the protagonist has delusions of a trapped woman creeping behind the room’s wallpaper, or the whispers from her dead mother that one character hears in Amy Lukavics’ The Women in the Walls.

Walls can be an “in-between” place, as they are in Neil Gaiman’s The Wolves in the Walls and Coraline,  in which the main characters have to make choices about whether they will be passive or active participants in their own lives. If you are on the outside, walls can be a barrier you look to cross that conceal a treasure inside, as in The Secret Garden, and if you are on the inside they can be a trap– a haunted house that won’t let go, a locked-room mystery you can’t escape, like the inhabitants of the island in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. If you are the builder, like Hugh Crain in The Haunting of Hill House, you can make the walls be disorienting and disturbing to inhabitants to influence their minds, and if you want to keep people away, like Baba Yaga, you can decorate with human skulls.

Or you can follow your passion where it goes, and both protect and beautify the world by transforming walls into something new, like the boy who drew cats.

Posted on December 13, 2017 by , Reply

Book List: Doubles and Doppelgangers

Our shadows may seem insubstantial, but their reach is long, and they are always with us (except for the one in Andersen’s “The Shadow“. Our reflections may not reveal what we hope for: sometimes, as with the hobgoblin’s mirror in Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”, beauty is distorted into ugliness. It’s no wonder that it is unsettling to discover a shadow self– either a nearly perfect double, or a dark half (or sometimes both).  They’re everywhere in literature, from Shakespeare to Shelley. The next time you’re feeling lonely, try one of these out.

 

Weep No More, My Lady by Mary Higgins Clark

This suspenseful mystery centers on Elizabeth Lange, whose sister, the famous actress Leila LaSalle, was recently murdered. Leila’s fiance, wealthy businessman Ted Winters, is on trial for her murder, and Elizabeth will soon testify at his trial. Despite this, Elizabeth accepts an invitation from Ted to spend several days at a luxury spa in California, where she discovers that Ted is not the only one with a motive for murder. While there’s no physical double for either of the main characters, an unexpected similarity is key to the mystery.

 

An Artificial Night by Seanan McGuire

This is the third book in Seanan McGuire’s October Daye urban fantasy series, which presents a world where Faerie and contemporary human society intersect. October is a changeling, with a background as a private detective, and she does a great job at getting herself into deadly situations. In this book, her Fetch, an exact double named May Daye, appears. Typically, a Fetch is an omen of death,and naturally, it’s disconcerting to have an omen of death following you around,  but May becomes an entertaining and well-developed character. Since there are additional books, I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that October survives the book and May follows her into the next one. McGuire also does a fabulous job writing about doubles and reflections in the two books Indexing and Indexing: Reflections.

 


The Second Lady by Irving Wallace

I first read this political thriller in middle school in the 1980s, and it was slightly more plausible then. It’s a little dated now, but still holds up well, so long as you remember that it does, in fact, take place in the early 1980’s (the most recent president mentioned is Carter) and has absolutely no connection to reality. The premise is that a Soviet intelligence agent discovers an actress, Vera Vavilova, who is almost a perfect physical double of the American First Lady, Billie Bradford. He trains Vera to be a perfect double in every way, good enough to step right into Billie’s shoes at a sensitive time in negotiations between America and the U.S.S.R.  The plot is clunky, but the idea is pretty awesome, and the conclusion is chilling to think about.

 

Stranger With My Face by Lois Duncan

In this YA title, Laurie, who has morphed into a lovely teenage girl over the summer, discovers she is adopted and has a twin who she can reach through astral projection. Of course, no good can come from this. It is creepy as all get out, and if you ever wished for a twin, you won’t do it again after you finish this book.

 


Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Our nameless narrator describes how wealthy widower Maximilian de Winter swept her away from her cares, married her, and took her to his estate, Manderley, leaving her to the tender mercies of the hostile housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. Mrs. Danvers clearly worshipped Maxim’s first wife, Rebecca, and there is great mystique about her, and mystery about her untimely demise. As her insecurities about her marriage grow, the second Mrs. de Winter becomes increasingly obsessed with Rebecca.

 

The Dark Half by Stephen King

The Dark Half is almost semi-autobiographical. Just about the time it was published, King announced he was retiring his pseudonym, Richard Bachman. In the book, writer Thad Beaumont has been successfully writing gory thrillers under the pseudonym George Stark. When Beaumont decides to kill off George Stark, he does not go gently. Instead, he comes fully to life, and goes on a murderous rampage. This isn’t King’s best book, but it is memorable, and a heck of a story.

 

Dopplegangster by Laura Resnick

This is the second book in the Esther Diamond urban fantasy series (I recommend starting with Disappearing Nightly, the first one). Esther is a different kind of urban fantasy protagonist: she’s an aspiring actress who waitresses part-time at a mob-owned restaurant, hangs out with an ancient magician named Max and a retired wiseguy named Lucky, and she might be involved with the policeman in charge of the Organized Crime Unit. More of an entertainer than a badass, somehow she always ends up entangled in supernatural events. In Doppelgangster, Esther witnesses the murder of a mobster just after an exact double appears in the restaurant she is working in. As more doubles pop up, followed by murders of the originals, Esther and her friends search for the solution to the crimes, ending up in absurd situations along the way. For humor, mystery, and the paranormal, with a touch of romance, you can’t go wrong.

 


The Willow Files, vol. 2 by Yvonne Navarro

This out-of-print book focuses on episodes from the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer that put an emphasis on the character of Willow, and includes the novelization of Doppelgangland, where Willow meets her doppelganger, identical in appearance, but from an alternate dimension in which she is a bored, charismatic, and very evil vampire.

 

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

You can’t go wrong with a classic. Dr. Henry Jekyll experiments on himself with a potion that is supposed to divide him into “good” and “evil” individuals temporarily. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Hyde, his dark and unexpectedly violent alter ego, has no intention of reintegrating with Dr. Jekyll.

 

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Don’t write this off because it has achieved the status of a classic: it is absolutely chilling. Dorian Gray is a young man, angelic in appearance, with an excess of charisma. He’s also selfish and manipulative. An artist in love with Dorian paints an extraordinary portrait of him, which turns out to possess an unsettling quality: it takes on the evidence of age and the ugliness that would otherwise appear in his face, leaving him looking forever young and handsome as he commits more and more unspeakable acts. The portrait, however, becomes a hideous reflection of his true self.

 


Coraline by Neil Gaiman

In this extremely creepy children’s book, Coraline has just moved into a new house with parents that more or less ignore her, and bizarre neighbors nearby. As she explores the house, she finds a door in the wall that leads her to the family of her dreams. They’re almost like her parents, except they’re attentive and loving, and oh yes, they have buttons for eyes. Obviously, no good can come from this. I’m just going to say that the Other Mother, with her button eyes, has always creeped me out– so much so that I had to hide my daughter’s Lalaloopsy doll.

 

 

Posted on July 1, 2016 by , Reply

Frankenweenie as a Gateway to Literature and Life Lessons

We watched Frankenweenie last night (I explained to the kids that some parts would be sad or scary and they voted to try it) and both during the movie and this morning it was interesting to see what they had picked up. I don’t think Tim Burton was trying to teach my kids about the literature and movies of the horror genre, or offer them life lessons, but Frankenweenie opened up opportunities to talk about these things.

Most people probably don’t have kids who immerse themselves in everything they can find out about monster movies and stop motion animation. But I do have one of those kids. To be clear, he hasn’t seen the Universal monster movies, but he is fascinated by them and reads everything he can find. He’s watched a lot of the Japanese monster movies and cheesy science fiction movies of the 1950s and 1960s, and has managed to see many of the movies Ray Harryhausen worked on. He also has started to notice plays on words, and he saw a lot of things in Frankenweenie that he picked up on right away, like, say, a main character named Victor Frankenstein who digs up a body in a graveyard and brings a creature back to life during an electrical storm. “This movie is like Frankenstein! The name is the same!” He noticed that Victor’s dog is named Sparky, “like electricity has sparks, and Sparky has electricity.”  The turtle that comes back to life is gigantic “like Gamera”! It’s also named Shelley “because turtles have shells”. I told him that Shelley was also the last name of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. “Oh yeah! That’s cool! The name is both of those things!” We also talked about how Elsa’s last name, Van Helsing, is the name of the vampire slayer in Dracula, and that she gets kidnapped by a bat; that the mayor is called the Burgermeister, like in Rankin-Bass’ stop motion Christmas special “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town”; that the movie, which is a stop-motion animation movie, starts with Victor showing a stop-animation film; that the movie is black and white, like the original Frankenstein movie; and that the science teacher looked a lot like Vincent Price. That’s a lot to unpack from an animated children’s movie.

The movie had a much different effect on my daughter. The attack of the reanimated pets on the town really scared her and I had to leave the room with her for awhile. She asked “did anybody get hurt”? Well, the attack is scary, but nobody is really hurt, and parts are even a little funny. Then she wanted to know why the animals turned out differently from Sparky. So we talked about how Victor decided to bring Sparky back because he loved him, but the other kids brought their pets back because they wanted to win the science fair. That was something the science teacher had talked about, the importance of doing science with love, and doing the right thing. Then she asked if bringing Sparky back, even out of love, was the right thing. At that point in the movie, Sparky had escaped from Victor’s house and returned to the cemetery. It seemed like that was where he wanted to be, at rest in the cemetery. “Sparky wasn’t ready to die. But he did, and he wants to be at rest, so maybe he should be at rest. Victor should let him.”  Smart little girl.

Later, both kids asked why the parents made the science teacher leave, because “it’s important to learn science”. It’s hard to explain to kids that adults don’t always want to understand the world, or want their kids to understand. “But science is good”! I reminded them that the science teacher had said that science is neither bad nor good– and that’s why you should be careful with how you use it.

That message gets somewhat lost at the movie’s ending, because after Sparky saves the day at the expense of his own life, and Victor is able to finally let go of his grief, his parents convince the rest of the adults in town to bring back Sparky once again. The same unthinking adults who got rid of the science teacher out of fear reanimate a dead dog without any further thought as to whether it’s right or wrong (I didn’t discuss this part with my kids). In spite of the pasted-on happy ending, though, Frankenweenie, quite unexpectedly, offered a lot of food for thought as well as entertainment value.

Although most people aren’t watching scary movies to improve their cultural literacy or provide them with opportunities for deep philosophical discussions, we can watch out for those teachable moments. It doesn’t take forever to point out a literary or cultural reference when you see it, and if your kids are interested, the Internet makes it easy to explore further. If your kids come up with a question that they really want to talk about, take it seriously and do your best to help them figure things out.  In Frankenweenie, Tim Burton provided a gateway, but I held my kids’ hands as we walked through to a larger world.

Here are a few other scary movies for kids that might lend themselves to more than just entertainment. As always, not every movie is appropriate for every child.

 

Toy Story

Monsters, Inc

Spirited Away

The Neverending Story

Coraline

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on August 18, 2013 by , Reply
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