Anne

Yesterday, I learnt with delight that Anne of Green Gables - my favourite book of all time - is huge in Japan.

It was a book that was a pivotal part of my childhood, because I, too, was a freckled, redheaded, skinny child with no friends, an overactive imagination and the inability to put anything in perspective, and so I loved all of the Anne books with a deep and fervent passion: drew an entirely unrealistic amount of comfort from her lifelong romance with Gilbert Blythe and her meteoric rise from unloveable orphan to - ahem - teacher (at the time I was deeply unimpressed by this: with hindsight, perhaps even less so) and I was definitely under the impression for a long time that she and I were actually the same person, a century removed from each other. She remains, as far as I`m concerned, one of the most vivid fictional characters ever created, and so while she may not have been particularly well loved by my peers (they were busy dancing to MC Hammer) it wasn`t a massive surprise to me that she`s been adored in Japan for decades. Harry Potter, it seems, was not the only Western children`s novel that captured the imaginations of a nation of adults, and Akage no An (Anne of Red Hair) was both an anime and a compulsory text in Junior High school for a number of years.

I can only assume that those years were not the ones during which the head of the English department at Kitago was at school.

"Have you heard of Akage no An?" I asked her this morning.
"Of course!" she said. "It is very famous here. Although I never read it. But I heard of it."
"It`s my favourite book!" I told her enthusiastically. "Isn`t it wonderful? Isn`t it just so heartwarming?"
My colleague looked at me in shock. "Mmmm," she said. "You really think so?"
"Of course! I`ve loved it since I was a child. It makes me so happy."
Yuko looked even more alarmed.
"It makes you happy? But it`s very sad, isn`t it?"
"Is it?" I`m rereading it at the moment, but I couldn`t remember it being particularly sad when I was eight years old. "What`s sad about it?"
"Well, she dies doesn`t she?"
"Umm...." I trawled my memory. "I don`t think so. I mean, there`s six books and she gets married and has children. Maybe she dies in the last one, but...."
"No, I`m certain she dies. Anne with red hair: she dies, I am sure of it."
"Really? Crikey. What have the Japanese done to it? She didn`t die in England."
"Yes, yes, she dies. Very sad. And she`s - - - nandake....." Yuko got her dictionary out. "A Jew?"
"Anne of Green Gables is a Jew? Now that definitely wasn`t in the Canadian version. Why have the Japanese made her a Jew?"
"She`s a Jew and she dies. It`s terrible. Not heartwarming at all. It shouldn`t make you happy, Holly."
"No, I can see that dying wouldn`t be heartwarming but...." I looked at Yuko. "Hang on. A Jewish Anne who dies and it`s very sad? Are you talking about Anne Frank by any chance?"
"Anne who? Did she have red hair?"
"No. She was a little girl who kept a diary in the War and was killed by the Nazis, and it`s very sad and does not make me happy."
"That`s it! But she`s not Anne with Red Hair? She`s not this Anne of Green Gables?"
"No. She`s a different Anne entirely."
"Ooooh. I thought they were the same person. That`s why I never read the book."
"Right. Well. There is a bit of a difference. Unfortunately, because Anne of Green Gables is fictional and Anne Frank was not."
"Maybe I`ll read that one now then. If she doesn`t die in a concentration camp."
"I think I can promise you quite solemnly that Anne of Green Gables does not die in a concentration camp. Tragically, the one who did was real."

I`m not sure, exactly, what the marketing around Anne has been in Japan, but it has clearly become a little bit confused; leaving an entire generation to well up as soon as they spot a red plait. And as happy as I am that Anne is so popular here - both of them, combined into one person - it seems even more poignant that the fictional girl got such a lovely ending, and the real girl such a tragic one.

There`s scope for imagination here, after all, in swapping them over.