“What are you doing, son?” the American soldier with the Japanese face asks.

“Drawing.” Seiji holds up a scrap of cardboard on which he has drawn a picture of his old neighborhood before Tokyo was firebombed and his neighborhood erased.

“Nice work!” the soldier says in Japanese. He squats down to have a closer look. “Is that all you have to draw on?”

“Mmmm, I found it over there.” He aims a charcoal-begrimed finger at a nearby trash heap next to the concrete remains of wha...

The Grocery Thief

I don't think there's a human being alive who is familiar with crows and ravens who doesn't think of them as thieves.

They rummage through garbage, steal crops from farmers, steal eggs from the nests of other birds, and kill their young.

Ask most anyone what their opinion is of ravens and crows and they respond reflexively “They're noisy, and they're all thieves and robbers.”

Then, with...

Since it was a beautiful, sunny day, grandfather decided to walk along the Motsukisamu River, which was near the condominium where he and grandmother lived.

As he was leaving, grandmother said: “Now, you be careful of those dogs that run around there, because they bark, and they've been known to bite, especially one of them. That little monster is a vicious little gray devil with very sharp teeth, who has b...

What struck me most reading George Polley’s books, Grandfather and the Raven and The Old Man and the Monkey are their ability to relocate the reader geographically without dislocating him culturally or intellectually. The place is maybe Japan but the moral of the stories are to be applied everywhere, and on everyone.

My children read both books and enjoyed them immensely. They appreciated the sense of adventure, readability and the uniqueness of the style. I appreciated their subtle moral...