The Funny Little Woman
by Blair Lent
Summary
Arlene Mosel adapts a Japanese folktale, drawing on a version the writer Lafcadio Hearn had recorded in 1902, about a cheerful old woman who loses a rice dumpling down a hole in her kitchen floor and, without a second thought, climbs down after it. The hole leads to an underground world watched over by carved Jizo statues, who warn her about the wicked oni, horned demons living further down, but she presses on anyway and is soon captured by the oni themselves, who put her to work cooking rice with a magic paddle that turns a single grain into an enormous pot of food. Years pass this way, the funny little woman growing steadily more homesick even as she keeps cooking for her captors, until she finally manages to escape with the magic paddle itself, fleeing across a river that the oni drink dry to stop her, until she looks so funny struggling through the mud that they burst out laughing and all the water falls from their mouths back into the river. Back home at last, she uses the stolen paddle to start a successful business selling rice dumplings, turning the very skill her captivity taught her into her own quiet fortune.
Blair Lent illustrates the underground and overground halves of the story in distinctly different registers, muted and warm above ground, stranger and more shadowed in the demons' world below, giving the book's two settings a clear visual split a young reader can track without needing to be told which world they are looking at. It suits children roughly five to nine, since the oni are genuinely frightening in a way gentler folktale adaptations often soften, though the woman's own cheerful persistence keeps the story from tipping into anything too dark.
Historical Context & Significance
The Funny Little Woman, published by Dutton in 1972, won Lent the 1973 Caldecott Medal. That year's Honor books were Gerald McDermott's Anansi the Spider, Leonard Baskin's Hosie's Alphabet, Nancy Ekholm Burkert's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Tom Bahti's When Clay Sings. Mosel adapted her retelling from Lafcadio Hearn's The Old Woman Who Lost Her Dumpling, issued in Tokyo in 1902 as a single volume in Hasegawa's Japanese fairy tale series, one of the early English language routes by which stories like this one reached a Western audience.
The book followed One Fine Day in the medal's sequence and preceded Duffy and the Devil the year after, sitting in the middle of a run of 1970s Caldecott years that leaned heavily on retold folklore from outside the Anglo American tradition, part of a broader shift in the prize during the decade toward stories drawn from Japanese, Cornish, West African and Pueblo sources rather than the European tales that had dominated its first twenty years.