KOIDE, Shogo (trans.).

£1,300 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Nankyoku he itta neko no hanashi ("The Story of the Cat who Went to the South Pole"). First edition of this early Japanese adaptation of Ruth & Latrobe Carroll's Luck of the Roll and Go (1935). The pictorial front board is clearly modelled on the dust jacket of the English edition, and Koide states in his preface that the illustrations were drawn by Ruth Carroll herself.The story follows a kitten called Luck (here translated as Tora) as he stows away on the Roll and Go bound for Antarctica. He makes friends with huskies but fails to do so with the penguins, experiences a glacier break up, flies over the South Pole, runs from the jaws of a killer whale, and discovers a fire set in the ship's hold by some rats. The author produced one other work based on the South Pole: Nankyoku tanken izunori-tai ("The Antarctic Expedition Dog Sled Team"). This charted the adventures of the husky handlers who were part of Shirase Nobu's Antarctic expedition. Koide Shogo (1897-1990) was a prolific author and translator of children's literature. In 1939 he was awarded a children's literature prize for his short story Tabo, following the adventures of an unlucky boy by the same name. Later he served as the chairman of the Japanese Association of Writers for Children from 1966 to 1972. His other translations of Western works include Elizabeth Enright's Thimble Summer, Jules Verne's Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen, and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

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