036. Anno’s Magic Seeds

Mitsumasa Anno

One winter day, a happy-go-lucky young man named Jack meets a wizard, who gives him two golden seeds. “These are magic seeds. Bake one seed and eat it – you will not feel hungry for a whole year. Plant the other seed and you will get two more magic seeds next year.” Jack followed the wizard’s instructions. He baked and ate one seed and his hunger vanished. He planted the other seed and sure enough the plant came up and gave him two magic seeds the following year.

Jack did the same thing the next five years. Every year, he got two seeds, one to eat and the other to plant. He had no hunger and all he had to do was to plant one seed every year and look after the plant.

After five years of such carefree living, however, Jack had a thought: “Why am doing the same thing every year? What will happen if I plant both seeds one winter and eat something else for a year?” The next year, he planted both the seeds and survived by eating other things. So he got four seeds the following year. He ate one and planted the other three. That brought him six seeds.

Jack continued to do so year after year and soon he had plenty of seeds. He started selling some of them in the market. He also married a girl called Alice and they had a baby. He was now very busy all the time tending to his field, marketing the seeds and also taking care of family.

Ten years went by. Jack’s field produced more and more seeds every year and he became prosperous selling lots of seeds in the market every year. Just three seeds were enough for the family to survive.

Then came a violent storm, the river overflowed and his field was flooded. Jack’s entire crop was carried away by the flood waters. His house and the three of them barely survived. Jack told Alice, “I am glad we survived the storm. I had saved ten seeds from last time. Let us begin again.” Jack baked three seeds as food for the family. He planted the rest of the seeds in the ground. Jack and Alice then bowed their heads and prayed together for a good crop.

Background: This is an abridged version of the children’s book Anno’s Magic Seeds, written and illustrated by Mitsumasa Anno. The author was born in Tsuwano, Japan, in 1926. He has written and illustrated more than 100 books greatly appreciated by children and adults around the world. He has received many awards and honours for his work, including the Hans Christian Anderson Award from the International Board on Books for Young People in 1984.

You can buy the English version of the book from online stores or borrow it from the Internet Archive. A bilingual English-Hindi version is available here, which is the website of by Arvind Gupta, known for his methods of making science toys using ordinary material. The translation into Hindi is also by him.

The original story has many layers: It can be read as a simple children’s story or it can be used to teach mathematics to children. The deeper layer concerns the way Jack changes his life from a carefree one to a prosperous and busy grower and seller of magic seeds, reminding us of Heinrich Boll’s story about the fisherman and the tourist (published on this site).

 

At the end of Arvind Gupta’s book, I found the following lines: “Anno believes that children enjoy the playful solving aspect of mathematics and that they use their natural mathematical abilities in many ways as part of their daily lives. In Anno’s Magic Seeds, he has not set out to teach arithmetic by using it within the story; instead the movement is in the opposite direction – it is the math that moves the narrative along and adds to the fun of reading it.”