ehon.cloud

This website aims to explore the ways in which Japanese picture books for children (ehon), published after 1945, mediate a relationship with nature and the living, more-than-human world. The ehon database, developed under the motto Storytelling for Earthly Survival¹, also serves as the online counterpart to a growing physical library of this collection. It brings together selected titles with a focus on the aliveness and agency of more-than-human protagonists. The heroes of these books may be the elements themselves or parts of the landscape; we encounter a wealth of animated, anthropomorphized objects and natural things, as well as various kinds of insects and small creatures. The aim of the research is to support an understanding of these protagonists as autonomous agents of narrative, to create space for examining their position and function within storytelling, and — through critical reflection and engagement with the books — to cultivate ways of relating to living nature that go beyond the extractivist.Individual books are accompanied by short descriptions, and selected spreads are supplemented with translations of the texts.

One of the starting points of the project is the observation that ehon is characterized by a specific environmental sensitivity, which manifests in its themes and narratives as well as in its visual strategies. Compared to European or American children's literature, Japanese picture books feature a notably higher number of anthropomorphized natural phenomena and objects. And it is not only a matter of stories in which human characteristics are attributed to non-human protagonists — characters also attempt to empathize with "more-than-human actors," or even become them.

Picture books, which often work with a slow narrative rhythm, anthropomorphization and the perspective of non-human actors, open up space for perceiving and analyzing the relationships between humans and their surroundings. The question of whom we recognize as living, autonomous, capable of acting is directly linked to the status that entity holds in human society. The project focuses not only on the content of individual stories, but also on visual language, the materiality of the book, and the ways in which image and text together shape ecological imagination. The database is intended to serve both as an open research tool and as a source of inspiration for further study, curatorial projects, and pedagogical work centered on storytelling about a world shared with other living species.

On the basis of research and ongoing analysis, I have identified several thematic areas that serve as orientating categories by which the books on this website are organized. These are not intended as a strict taxonomy — individual titles frequently cross the boundaries of a single group and move across multiple thematic levels. The categories function primarily as orientating labels that can be used to filter books within the database.

The defined thematic areas include the following:

Anthropomorphized landscapes — landscape units or geographical features appear as independent agents in the story; mountains, rivers or islands may acquire voice, activity or their own perspective.

Plants — trees, flowers and other plants appear as protagonists or supporting characters in the story.

Insects and critters— tiny beings associated with the soil; stories focused on the lives of small and often overlooked organisms and their life cycles, representing human concerns to varying degrees.

Characters of natural objects — stones, acorns, seeds or other natural objects as story protagonists, whose "life" may unfold at the slow scale of natural processes.

Animated artefacts and moving things — objects of human making that acquire their own agency; they may move, communicate, and enter into relationships with their surroundings.

Weather — anthropomorphized meteorological phenomena such as rain, clouds, wind or snow, which become the bearers of narrative.

Anthropomorphized elements — animated elements such as water, wind or fire, rendered as beings or personified forces.

What all these areas share is an interest in the ways ehon attributes agency to beings, phenomena or objects that in anthropocentric storytelling tend to remain passive backdrop to human events. Stories — in Donna Haraway's words — offer and establish patterns of habitation through which we learn to relate to the world and its inhabitants. Through anthropomorphization, shifts in perspective, or poetic rendering of natural processes, ehon opens space for imagining a world shared with other forms of life — imagination as a mode of creative and playful engagement with living reality, through which we may deepen and cultivate our damaged relationship with the landscape and our sensitivity toward more-than-human organisms.

¹ I am quoting from the title of the film Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival, directed by Fabrizio Terranova.

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2016.