PICK UP A PENGUIN Jonathan Clements on the book that inspired the Penguin Highway anime
“W
hen I was in third grade, I spent September and October researching square things.” It is a typical statement from Aoyama, the super-serious pre-teen narrator of Tomihiko Morimi’s Penguin Highway. It is a statement of simple truth, but hints at statistical obsessions, an eidetic memory, and an inadvertent hint of recursive SF, recalling the inter-dimensional classic Flatland. Aoyama is an intensely inquisitive boy, determined to investigate all sorts of mysteries, unaware that his latest obsession is truly earth-shattering. Because he isn’t spending this summer thinking about square things, or boobs (life’s greatest mystery, he posits), or chess games, or Cambrian fossils. He is trying to work out why his anonymous suburban hometown is over-run with penguins. It’s hard to miss the English-language publication of Penguin Highway – it’s been all
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over the advertising banners on Anime News Network like a rash, showing off the iconic cover image derived from Hiroyasu Ishida’s acclaimed anime adaptation. The publication of Andrew Cunningham’s translation of the original novel serves to demonstrate just how good and close an adaptation Ishida’s anime was. The anime sold itself, as does this book, on the cute look of its swarm of penguins, although like so much else in the story, they are really red herrings – outer manifestations of a far more complex phenomenon. Things are most definitely not as they seem, which is why an unreliable narrator is such a wonderful coup in Morimi’s gentle, hopeful novel.Aoyama’s over-assured narration is sustained for the whole book, a focussed, statistically minded series of factual statements – some true, some plainly not. But he is 100% sure about all of them, as if the autistic-spectrum narrator of The Curious Incident of the Dog in
