Faithful Elephants

Benji Timoner

806

  Faithful Elephants is a twist on a regular children’s story—instead of beginning in sadness and ending in joy, it opens in happiness and ends in darkness. The true story takes place in a zoo in Japan during World War II. It tells of how three elephants were killed under orders from the army so that they wouldn’t escape and rampage through the city. The author, Yukio Tsuchiya, shows the impact of war on animals and people.

In the story the author uses the setting to express feeling and anticipate the variation of mood from beginning to end.

   The story starts at Ueno Zoo with cherry blossoms in full bloom. Tsuchiya describes the setting by saying: “Their petals are falling in the soft breeze and sparkling in the sun. Beneath the cherry trees, crowds of people are pushing to enter the zoo on such a beautiful day.” The author uses this setting to create a picture and feeling of happiness and peace. The author adds to the mood of joy by describing two elephants performing tricks, “While blowing toy trumpets with their long trunks the elephants walk along large wooden logs.” These playful elephants will be contrasted to the other elephants in the story. 

    The mood immediately shifts from happiness to foreboding when the author introduces a new setting. “Not far from the cheerful square, there stands a tombstone.” This sentence leads into the story about how the army was afraid that bombs would hit the zoo and let the animals loose, so they killed all of the big animals. When they tried to poison the elephants it didn’t work, so they starved the three elephants to death. The zookeeper loved the elephants so much that “he could only pace in front of the cage and moan.” That shows how empty everyone felt about what was happening. This section leads us to an ending of sorrow.

    The concluding setting paints a depressing picture. As the elephants lie dying, they can barely see “the white clouds floating in the sky over the zoo.” This is depressing because it is so beautiful and it is the last thing they will see. The story ends in the same way it began, with the description of cherry blossoms falling. However, the mood has changed completely: “The cherry blossoms fell on the grave, like snowflakes.” This demonstrates how much suffering happened in this zoo.

     From beginning to end the author takes us on a journey of moods. The author not only introduces different settings to create different moods, but also contrasts the same setting to highlight the mood of sorrow at the end of the story. In the beginning, the cherry blossoms are falling on a happy scene of life, but at the end they are falling on a scene of death. This shows us that tragedy happens even in beautiful places.  Because the author uses setting to make us feel the tragedy of the elephants at the zoo, the story makes us aware that happiness and peace are very precious.