ごん狐

About this story

作品について

Nankichi Niimi wrote this story when he was only 18. It appeared in January 1932 in Akai Tori (The Red Bird), the children's magazine that had earlier published Akutagawa's The Spider's Thread and Toshishun. Niimi grew up in Handa, a town in Aichi Prefecture, and the stream, the village and the fields of red spider lilies in the story come from the countryside he knew. He died of tuberculosis at 29, with only a few books to his name. Today Gon, the Little Fox has been in fourth-grade Japanese textbooks for decades, so almost everyone in Japan can tell you how it ends. It is written in the polite です/ます style and the sentences are short, but there is plenty to learn: country words for old tools and customs, rough spoken forms in the villagers' talk, and dozens of sound words such as ぴかぴか and ぐったり. There are six short chapters. Take them one at a time.