Winner of a Parents' Choice Gold Award
and NAPPA Silver Honor Award!
Steeped in the culture and language of Japan, Elizabeth Falconer is a storyteller with a feather-light touch. Weaving Japanese words into each story, she's also a master of the [+]Winner of a Parents' Choice Gold Award
and NAPPA Silver Honor Award!
Steeped in the culture and language of Japan, Elizabeth Falconer is a storyteller with a feather-light touch. Weaving Japanese words into each story, she's also a master of the 13-string, Japanese koto, and accompanies these colorful Japanese folk tales on that eloquent instrument. In the title story, a boy, born from a plum, becomes a hero when he and his friends a dog, a monkey and a pheasant to divert a pack of demon thieves from evil-doing and rescue a village. "Kumo the Spider" repays a farmer's good deed and spins not only cloth but clouds. "Issunboshi" is about a boy who is an inch tall and follows his dream to become a Samurai, with magical results, and in "Shiro and Kuro," a monkey teaches a couple of quarrelsome kitties a lesson in sharing. "The Tale of a Snail" paints vivid word pictures of a husband and wife planting and harvesting their rice fields and adopting a little snail, who comes to them courtesy of the Water God, as their son with rewarding results. It is an unusual, entertaining tour-de-force performance by a gifted artist. -Parents' Choice
Here's the short-take on Elizabeth Falconer's Plum Boy! And other tales from Japan: Buy the recording.
A newcomer to storytelling and a magical musician, Falconer weaves original and traditional Japanese folktales with the soothing sounds of the ancient koto on Plum Boy!
The resulting hour-long CD is a listening treat that is both calming and exciting. Filled with important life lessons, Japanese words, and cultural reflections, Plum Boy! And other tales from Japan is a fun, fascinating, and highly educational introduction to Japanese arts and language. While listening for the first time, my 4-year-old repeated the simple Japanese words and refrains Falconer injects into her tales. By the end of the 14-minute title story "Plum Boy!," she was singing right along with Falconer's two young sons in a rousing chorus of the Japanese translation of Plum Boy: "Sumomotaro-san, Sumomotaro- san!"
Falconer, who now lives in Renton, Washington, spent 12 years in Japan and began studying koto in 1979. Since then, she has become a master player of the courtly 13-string instrument introduced in Asia more than 1,000 yea
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