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About this story

作品について

Nankichi Niimi wrote Gon, the Little Fox at 18, and foxes kept coming back into his stories. Buying Mittens was published in September 1943 in his second book of children's stories. He had planned the book himself, but it came out about six months after he died of tuberculosis at 29. (He is said to have written the first draft ten years earlier, at 20.) Like Gon, it has been in Japanese school textbooks for many years, so almost everyone in Japan knows it. The two stories make a pair. In Gon, a fox and a human fail to understand each other until it is too late. Here the meeting goes well, and yet the mother fox is not sure what to think. The story ends on her question and leaves it open. For learners it is a friendly text. It is written in the polite です/ます style, and much of it is talk between a mother and a small child, so you meet a lot of children's Japanese: お手々, ねんね, なあに, 〜ちゃった. There are plenty of sound words too, such as キラキラ, よちよち and トントン. A few spellings are old (或朝, 電燈, 十米), but the furigana and the dictionary will carry you through.