Alice, Me, and Wonderland

The other day, I was browsing on eBay when I came across the version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that I owned in Japan. The price was 10 times the cover price since it was out of print and marketed to US buyers. (I checked Amazon Japan, and even though the book price was reasonable, their shipping fee was too much.) Since I no longer had that original book, I bought this one because I particularly loved the Alice illustrations by this Japanese artist, Makoto Wada.

This book was the first Alice book I owned and bought for myself. It was an inexpensive pocket-sized softcover with small type ("bunkobon" = Japanese mass paperback), which I could afford as a kid.

My first encounter with an Alice book was much earlier when I was in elementary school. I found it in my school library and fell in love with it. My mother told me decades later that I took it everywhere I went and even slept with this library book! 

Why was the Alice book so special to me? Because it was the story of a girl who tumbled down into a place called Wonderland that was strange and unreasonable. But despite this, she just kept going being herself. It gave me hope that there was another world besides this world, and Alice could live through it. 

I read many books when I was a child and continued reading after I grew up. I can say I was saved by books throughout my life. But Alice is the only book that has never lost its shine for me.

If I could time travel and go back to the childhood me, she wouldn't believe I ended up creating The Alice Journal in English in a foreign country she hardly knew about. I hope she would be proud.

Life is curious.