Grandfather's Journey
by Allen Say
Summary
Allen Say tells his own grandfather's story: a young man leaves Japan during the Meiji era to cross the Pacific and see America, and falls in love with the country's rivers, deserts, and growing cities almost as deeply as he loves the home he left behind. He returns to Japan to marry his childhood sweetheart, brings her back to settle in California, and the two raise a daughter there before homesickness eventually pulls the whole family back to Japan for good. The grandfather spends the rest of his life longing for California even though he never crosses the ocean again, and the Second World War closes off any real chance of return; the book ends with Say himself, the grandson, retracing his grandfather's original crossing as an adult, and finding in himself the same divided longing, missing whichever country he currently is not standing in.
Say paints in still, formal watercolors, posed compositions and muted sepia tones deliberately built to resemble old studio photographs rather than a typical picture book's busier action, giving his own family's history the quiet weight of an actual album passed down through generations.
Quieter and more reflective than most Caldecott winners, the book suits readers around six and up who can sit with a story about longing rather than incident, and many adult readers report that it lands differently once they have themselves left one home behind for another. The text moves in short, plain sentences that never explain the grandfather's divided feelings outright, trusting the pictures and the pacing to carry an emotion the book itself never once names directly.
Historical Context & Significance
Grandfather's Journey won the 1994 Caldecott Medal in a year with an unusually large field of five Honor Books: Ted Lewin's Peppe the Lamplighter, Denise Fleming's In the Small, Small Pond, Gerald McDermott's Raven: A Trickster Tale, Kevin Henkes's Owen, and Chris Raschka's Yo! Yes?.
The book is directly autobiographical, built from Say's own family history of immigration between Japan and the United States, and it is frequently cited for placing a Japanese American immigrant experience at the center of a major American children's book award at a time when few Caldecott winners had done so. Say both wrote and illustrated the book entirely on his own, and its quiet, photograph like style has since become closely associated with his name across the rest of his career, even in books that draw on subjects outside his own family history.