(ARC was provided to read and review.)

The book contains seven short stories which are all set on the 15th of August 1945, the day Japan surrendered in WW II.
The stories are told in the style of children's fables and often an animal plays a mayor part in them (whale, parrot, she-wolf, cockroach). The language is clear and often even poetic, but happy tales they are not. War is cruel and it's the innocent children who suffer the most. In this stories children die, suffer, starve to death. These are stories which make you think, which will linger with you for a long time and which also offer a good glimpse into life in Japan during the second World War and the Japanese way of thinking, where it's a disgrace to be a POW and a great honour to kill yourself as a kamikaze bomber.

The Whale That Fell in Love with a Submarine is the story of a whale, who has problems finding a female partner as he is too big in size for his species, the sardine whales. He lives a lonely life, until he happens to come across a Japanese submarine, where the crew has just heard the news, that the war is over, but they aren't sure if they should believe it or if they are just tricked by the enemy.
They decide to not give up fighting in any case, when the whale starts to basically rock the boat, showing his affection, for what he believes is a female whale and hopefully the love of his life.
Their close encounter is disturbed by the arrival of American warships and when the attack towards the submarine is launched, the whale doesn't want to leave his partner and tries to protect "her".
It doesn't end well for the poor whale, but his sacrifice wasn't in vain, it leads to an interesting shift in thought aboard the submarine.

In The Parrot and the Boy, an eight year old child tries to survive by itself in an air raid shelter at the foothills of the mountains. The only company he has, is his pet parrot, who can speak. He has already been hiding since a couple of weeks night and day in the shelter and why he is there all alone is heart breaking, as is the end of the story.

The Mother that Turned into a Kite is the story, which touched me the most and which I will remember for some time to come. A mother tries to save her child from burning to death, after their way to the air raid shelter is cut off by scorching flames, following the bombardment of their town. The end is sad and poetic, both at the same time.

The Old She-Wolf and the Little Girl. Here a mother has to leave her young daughter behind, fleeing from their town. The child suffers from measels and the group is afraid, that she might give it to all of the other children. The mother, who has two young boys to consider, too, assumes, that her daughter won't survive the high fever and puts her into a basket with some food, then places her in the long grass. There the girl is found by an elderly she-wolf soon after and the two found an unlikely bond. Again it doesn't end all smiles.

The Red Dragonfly and the Cockroach is the story of a young kamikaze bomber pilot, who loses directions over the ocean on his way to commit suicide in order to attack the enemy and has to perform an emergency landing on an island. Main reason for the landing is his unlikely friend, a pet cockroach, which he took with him and now deeply regrets his decision, as he would prefer for the animal to survive, instead of having to die, too.

The Prisoner of War and the Little Girl is the tale of an American POW, who escaped during a bombing from the prison camp and has made his way to the air raid shelters up at the hillside. There he has taken refuge. After some days a six or seven year old Japanese girl turns up, who has lost both her parents and the two become friends and hide in the selter until the war is over. The end of the story is excellent, as it shows, that the official end ot the war is just the beginning of a long process to trust each other again.

The last story The Cake Tree in the Ruins made me actually smile and here we have a happy ending, at least for some children in the story.
A group of starving children discovers a mysterious tree in the burned out ruins of the town. They find out, that the twigs ot the tree are edible and taste delicious and they regrow, which means they will always find something to eat. The tree is a Baumkuchen tree. Baumkuchen (tree cake) is a German cake, where layer upon layer is heated up and finally the whole thing is covered in chocolate. It's usually a Christmas treat in certain regions of Germany and I love to eat the stuff.

Overall the book contains a set of excellent stories, which are a combination of war literature and children's fables. As the most of them are very dark with sad endings where often children die, they aren't stories for young kids. They are more suitable for older children and teens, where
WW II is subject during history lessons.
The award-winning author, Akiyuki Nosaka, knows, sadly, very well, what he's writing about, his adoptive parents were killed in the bombing of Kobe, Japan in 1945 and just 14 years old he fled with his younger sister to an evacuation camp, where she died of starvation.
Mika Provata-Carlone's illustrations are wonderful black and white drawings and they tie in perfectly. ( )

'Contes de guerre' est une suite de récits humanistes mettant en scène chacun un animal et un ou plusieurs êtres humains dont le destin se croise pendant les derniers jours de la seconde Guerre mondiale. Une baleine amoureuse d'un sous-marin kamikaze, un gardien du zoo d'Ueno qui s'exile avec son éléphant, un orphelin attaché au perroquet de son père...
Les contes de Nosaka parlent de désespoir et de morts inutilement ironiques, mais aussi de la noblesse des sentiments humains.... et animaux! Personne n'échappe à la mort, personne n'échappe à la guerre: de la plus grosse baleine au plus petit cafard, sans oublier l'homme. ( )