Sunny day
A really pleasant day.
I see the Winnie the Pooh exhibition.
It was well designed to give visitors a good experience of the Ashdown Forest where the story takes place. I felt that the English countryside is beautiful and that both Winnie the Pooh and Peter Rabbit would not be possible without the English nature.
In the U.S., Winnie the Pooh was made into an animated cartoon by Disney, and the main character was Americanized to a great extent, and I heard that people in the U.K. criticized it, saying that it was not Winnie the Pooh.
Perhaps it was because I had too strong an image of the Disney cartoon, but when I saw E.H. Shepherd’s drawings of the original, it was refreshing. It renewed my awareness that this was the true worldview.
As a novelist, I was interested in the fact that A.A. Milne, the author of the Pooh series, suddenly broke away from children’s literature after writing a series of Pooh books and turned into a novelist for adults.
Apparently, his lack of success and disappointment with adult fiction was all due to a heartbreaking cry he left behind, “The main character in my latest play is, oh God, ‘Christopher Robin just became an adult. I think it all boils down to his plaintive cry, “My latest play’s protagonist is, oh God, ‘Christopher Robin just became an adult.
A single successful film has bound up the source of a lone writer’s creativity like a curse.
In other words, Milne did not break up with children’s literature, but only continued to write Winnie the Pooh in a different form as a result. It may be that Kenzaburo Oe, Soseki Natsume, Haruki Murakami, or any other novelist would have followed the same path. And, of course, I, too.
I wondered whether it was curse, comedy, tragedy, or fate, as I looked at Pooh, who looked cooler than the Disney version.
