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For something a little bit different, here's a free audio book, “イノシシ” (“Wild Boar”), story written by seven-year-old Anthony Friedl. Unabridged reading for you today by the author himself.

I'm really impressed with the quality of the recording, both in technical terms, and in Anthony's clear reading voice. More on the recording later in this post.

The Story

First, here's the story (unabridged! :-)), with my attempt at a translation:

This morning before school, I asked him to draw a picture to go along with the story (though he says it's not a “story”, it's a “silly”), and here's what he came up with a minute later:

“Wild Boar”
illustration by the author

I'm not entirely sure why he wrote this... I think it was for some school project. It was what happened to be at hand when he decided to record something, as I describe in “The Recording Session” below.

The genesis of the story, besides the imagination of a seven year old, is that when Anthony is heading out on his own, Fumie bids him farewell with a “Watch out for wild boar!”. On his trip to school each morning he has to cross four streets, and navigate sidewalks filled with people and bicycles, so of course we worry — first graders are not known for their attention span, even when their own safety is at stake. But she knows that if she bids him farewell with “Watch out for cars and bicycles!” that it'll soon become an ignored part of the morning pattern, rather than an active reminder, so she figures that making it silly will keep it fresh while still evoking what little attention we can expect from a kid his age. It seems to work. Wild boars... who would have thought? Brilliant.

The Recording Session

I've got a project cooking for which I need to do some high-quality audio recordings, something I know nothing about. A week or so ago (before a nasty cold stole a week of my life) I bought a Zoom H4n Handy Recorder, which is an amazing little device, much better than the last time I bought an audio-recording device (a cassette deck 30 years ago, I suppose). It's got tons of features that I have no idea how to use, but it's simple enough to press “record”, “stop”, and “playback”, so Anthony had fun playing around with it, recording the washing machine, his toys, interviewing Mommy, etc.

A few days ago, in a lull of relative health between the worst part of my cold and a subsequent bout of hellatious insomnia, Anthony and I were playing with it, and he decided he wanted to read something with it. So, I set it in a bowl on the dining-room table that allowed the built-in microphones to point up at him, and he grabbed something and read it. That's the recording above.

(He then read another somewhat longer story he wrote, “cockroach underwear”, which I will spare you.)

As I said, I'm really impressed with the quality of the recording. (If you're not, grab whatever audio-recording device you have lying around, and record a kid at the dining-room table, and see what kind of clarity you get.) It's the Zoom unit... it's just amazing. I've got a studio microphone on order to use with it, but even the built-in microphones are pretty good. Then there's Anthony's reading voice... so clear! I couldn't read that clearly.