Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens

小説「ザリガニが泣くところ」は、一人で成長する少女の物語、または彼女と死んだ男との関係を追うミステリーです。(English) The novel "Where the Crawdads Sing" is a story of a young girl growing up alone, or a mystery that follows her relationship with a dead man.

Where the Crawdads Sing is the first novel by novelist and zoologist Delia Owens.

It became a worldwide bestseller as soon as it was released in 2018.

Set in North Carolina in the 1950s and 1970s, the novel intertwines the growth of a young girl who survives strongly in a swamp all by herself with a mystery surrounding the death of a man.

Major characters in the novel "Where the Crawdads Sing."

Kya:

Catherine Danielle Clark (nicknamed "Kya")

Main character. Abandoned by her family, she has been living alone in a hut in the marsh since she was seven years old.

Tate Walker:

He met Kaia when she was a child and has been a good friend to her ever since. He is Kaia's, first love.

Jodie:

Kaia's older brother. He loves Kaia very much.

Chase Andrews:

A wealthy, playful young man in town. He was found dead one morning.

***

1)

Part I - The Marsh

In 1952, six-year-old Catherine Danielle Clark (nicknamed "Kya") watched her mother abandon her and her family due to violent abuse from her husband, Kya's father.

While Kya waits for her mother's return, she witnesses her older siblings, Missy, Murph, Mandy, and Jodie, leaving due to their father's drinking and physical abuse.

2)

Alone with her father-who, who temporarily stops drinking-Kya learns to fish.

Her father gives her his knapsack to hold her collections of shells and feathers.

The illiterate Kya paints these shells and feathers, as well as the marsh's creatures and shorelines, with watercolors her mother left behind.

3)

One day, Kya finds a letter in the mailbox.

Her father snatched the letter from her hands as she ran from the mailbox squealing with delight that they had finally received a letter from her mother.

After reading the letter, he becomes infuriated and burns the letter along with most of her mother's wardrobe and canvases.

4)

He returns to drinking and takes long, frequent trips away to gamble.

Eventually, he does not return, and Kya assumes he is dead, making him the last of the family to leave her alone in the marsh.

Without money and family, she survives by gardening and trading fresh mussels and smoked fish for money and gas from Jumpin', a Black man who owns a gasoline station at the boat dock.

Jumpin' and his wife Mabel become lifelong friends with Kya, and Mabel collects donated clothing for her.

5)

As Kya grows up, she faces prejudice from the townspeople of Barkley Cove, North Carolina, who nicknamed her "The Marsh Girl."

She is laughed at by the schoolchildren the only day she goes to school and is called "nasty" and "filthy" by the pastor's wife.

However, she becomes friendly with Tate Walker, an old friend of Jodie's who sometimes fishes in the marsh.

6)

When Kya loses her bearings one day, Tate leads her home in his boat.

Years later, he leaves her feathers from rare birds, then teaches her how to read and write.

The two form a romantic relationship until Tate leaves for college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He promises to return, yet later realizes Kya cannot live in his more civilized world because of how wild and independent she is and leaves her without saying goodbye.

7)

Part II - The Swamp

In 1965, Kya was 19. Chase Andrews, Barkley Cove's star quarterback and playboy, invite her to a picnic, during which he tries to have sex with her.

He later apologizes, but the two form a romantic relationship.

He shows her an abandoned fire tower, and she gives him a necklace of a shell he found during their picnic, strung on a rawhide string.

8)

Despite her suspicions, she believes Chase's promises of marriage and consummate their relationship in a cheap motel room in Asheville, North Carolina.

She leaves the grocery store one day, runs into Chase and his fiancé, and realizes his marriage promises were a ruse for sex.

She then ends their relationship.

9)

Tate, having graduated from college, visits Kya and attempts to apologize for having left her, and confesses his love for her.

Still hurt by his betrayal, she rejects him.

Despite this, she allows him inside her shack, and he is impressed by her expanded collection of seashells.

10)

He urges her to publish a reference book on seashells, and she does so, as well as on seabirds.

With the extra money, she renovates her home.

11)

The same year, Jodie, now in the Army, also returns to Kya's life, expressing regret that he left her alone and broke the news that their mother had had a mental illness and had died of leukemia two years previously.

12)

Kya forgives her mother for leaving but still cannot understand why she never returned.

After advising Kya to give Tate a second chance, Jodie sets off for Georgia, leaving Kya a note with his phone number and address.

13)

Sometime later, while relaxing in a cove, Kya is confronted by Chase.

After an argument ensues, Chase attacks Kya, beating her and attempting to rape her.

She fends him off and loudly threatens to kill him if he doesn't leave her alone.

The encounter is witnessed by two fishermen nearby.

14)

Back at her shack, Kya fears reporting the assault would be futile as the town would blame her for "being loose."

The following week, she witnesses Chase boating to her shack and hiding until he leaves.

Remembering her father's abuse, Kya fears retaliation from Chase, knowing "these men had to have the last punch."

15)

Kya is offered a chance to meet her publisher in Greenville, North Carolina, and takes the bus to meet him.

After she returns home the next day, some boys find Chase dead beneath the fire tower.

The sheriff, Ed Jackson, believes it to be a murder based on no tracks or fingerprints, including Chase's, around the tower.

16)

Ed speaks with sources and receives conflicting statements.

He learns the shell necklace Kya gave Chase was missing when his body was found, even though he wore it the night he died.

Kya was seen leaving Barkley Cove before the murder, returning the day after Chase died.

17)

There also were red wool fibers on Chase's jacket that belonged to a hat Tate had given to Kya.

Convinced she is the culprit responsible for Chase's murder, Ed arrests Kya near Jumpin's wharf, charges her with first-degree murder, and jails her without bail for two months.

18)

At Kya's trial in 1970, only contradictory and circumstantial evidence was provided.

Kya's lawyer, Tom Milton, debunks the prosecutor's arguments as there was no evidence that Kya was at the fire tower on the night of Chase's death.

The jury finds her not guilty.

19)

She returns home and reconciles with Tate.

They live together in her shack until she dies peacefully in her boat at age 64.

Later, while searching for Kya's will and other documents, Tate finds a hidden box with some of her old possessions and realizes that Kya had written poems under the name of Amanda Hamilton, frequently quoted throughout the book.

He also finds a poem that virtually describes the murder of Chase, obviously written from the murderer's point of view.

He then finds, underneath the poems, the shell necklace Chase wore until the night he died.

There is a clear implication that Kya had killed Chase.

Tate then burns the rawhide string and drops the shell onto the beach, choosing to hide Kya's secret forever.

**

A)

1)

Thoughts on the Novel Where the Crawdads Sing

The novel "Where the Crawdads Sing" is a story of a young girl growing up alone, or a mystery that follows her relationship with a dead man.

The first surprise in this work is the existence of a girl named Kya, who has lived alone since the age of seven in a small hut in a vast marshy area.

2)

Her own father's violence broke up her family, and her mother, brothers, and sisters each left home.

Kya was left alone with her father and spent her days doing the household chores forced upon her while being afraid of her father's violence.

Kya did not even go to school.

She helped out at home from an early age.

3)

Her kind brother taught her how to pilot a boat and the biology of the creatures in the wetlands.

This helped her learn the bare minimum of how to survive independently.

After her father left home, she endured the loneliness of having no one to talk to.

Kya lived alone to escape the scornful glances of the townspeople.

4)

Kya grew from a girl to a woman.

She had no one to talk to since childhood and grew up with the loneliness of not being loved.

However, Kya is supported by the marshland. She alters her ego.

5)

Eventually, Kya fell in love for the first time and was disappointed in its end.

Then she was painfully betrayed by her next love.

In the end, she was charged with murder.

The story unravels Kya's life story while at the same time depicting how a web of investigations into the case is closing in on her.

Doubts will linger until the end, wondering if Kya killed her.

6)

As for the ending, it was probably best to bury the truth in "Where the Crawdads Sing."

Kya was never close to anything like community or bonding.

However, she has always lived a positive life, loving the wetlands.

Her strong spirit will hearten us.

B)

7)

Highlights of the film "Where the Crawdads Sing."

Based on the best-selling novel of the same title, which has sold more than 15 million copies by American author Delia Owens. (As of July 2022)

It tells the story of a girl named Kya, who has lived alone in the swamps since the 1950s in North Carolina, U.S.A., and is now under suspicion.

8)

The original author, Delia Owens, is a writer and zoologist.

She is also a zoologist, and her love for the creatures that live in the wetlands is evident in the original story.

How is the true beauty of Kya, a wild child who loves wetland life as much as the author, expressed?

Watch out for Daisy Edgar Jones, who plays Kya's resilience and purity, living in the embrace of nature.

C)

9)

"Where the Crawdads Sing," an escape

"Where the Crawdads Sing" is the title of this film.

When Kya was a young girl, her oldest brother Jodie, the closest to her, tried to leave their violent father.

This is the advice he left for his younger sister Kya, who then had to live alone with their father.

If your father tries to beat you, run to "Where the Crawdads Sing."

10)

After hearing her brother's words, the young Kya began to spend as much time as possible in the marsh by herself, steering the boat and avoiding contact with her father.

Jodie also said, "That's what our mother used to say.

"Where the Crawdads Sing" can be seen as "the marsh" itself.

11)

However, although we could infer that "Where the Crawdads Sing" is a wetland, "Do crawdads make a cry?" many must have wondered.

Crayfish are not known to make any sound.

Most of the testimonies of "I could hear them squeak" were mistakenly attributed to the sound of gravel or the rubbing of crayfish shells.

Kya, who later grew up and studied biology, was probably aware that crawfish do not squeak.

12)

What is "the part where a non-sounding crayfish makes a sound"?

What kind of place is a place where we can sense sounds that should be imperceptible to human hearing?

It is no longer a place that humans have named "wetlands.

It may be a place where there is no room for human intellect or sensitivity.

13)

I hesitate to use the word "nature" to describe this place.

But there is no other way to describe it.

It may be possible to distance oneself from it with the word "awe slightly. Yet, there is a nature that is so absolute.

14)

If humans carelessly step into it, they will be preyed upon before realizing it.

It will return to being a part of "there," that is nothing.

No matter how much civilization has advanced and the affluence we have acquired, we continue to fear the nature that swallows everything inwardly.

That is why the city's people despised Kya as the "daughter of the marsh" as the flip side of this psychology.

D)

15)

Conclusion / The True Meaning of "Daughter of the Swamp

Kya was acquitted in the trial for Chase's murder and married Tate, her first love.

Many years later, Kya passed away, and Tate, who had lived with Kya and grown old together, found something while sorting through her belongings.

This raises the possibility that Kya is the real murderer of Chase once again.

So the film "Where the Crawdads Sing" concludes.

16)

It was only a "possibility" that was described.

However, many people will wonder if Kya was the real culprit.

If we find room for imagination in the ending, it is that "marsh girl" was never used in the original novel, only in the sense of a derogatory term used by the city's people.

Kya was the "daughter" of nature, sometimes called "the marsh" and sometimes "Where the Crawdads Sing," a place where there was no room for a man to step.

17)

Let us consider that she was not only a human being but also a fearsome nature that swallowed humans in the blink of an eye.

"It is no good or evil," the author says.

Kya must have swallowed Chase because he stepped lightly into "Where the Crawdads Sing," which is herself.

"I Was the Swamp."

Those words spoken at the end of the film are probably all that Kya, a human being and daughter of "Where the Crawdads Sing," had to say.

Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens
An evaluation of the original novel of the movie "Where the Crawdads Sing" and its conclusion. Who is the natural killer? How is the life of the "girl in the marsh," and how does the case end?

https://cinemarche.net/drama/where-the-crawdads-sing-sigemi/

Where the Crawdads Sing (2022) - IMDb

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1468973593/?playlistId=tt9411972&ref_=tt_pr_ov_vi

Where the Crawdads Sing (2022) - Wikipedia 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_the_Crawdads_Sing

Carolina - Taylor Swift

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-lcttAPeTY

Oh, Carolina creeks are running through my veins.

Lost I was born, lonesome I came.

Lonesome, I'll always stay.

Carolina knows why, for years, I roam.

Free as these birds, light as whispers

Carolina knows

And you didn't see me here.

No, they never did see me here.

And she's in my dreams.

Into the mist, into the clouds

Don't leave

I make a fist. I'll make it count.

And there are places I will never, ever go.

And things that only Carolina will ever know.

Carolina stains on the dress she left

Indelible scars, pivotal marks

Blue as the life she fled

Carolina pines, won't you cover me?

Hide me like robes down the back road

Muddy these webs we weave

And you didn't see me here.

Oh, they never did see me.

And she's in my dreams.

Into the mist, into the clouds

Don't leave

I make a fist. I'll make it count.

And there are places I will never, ever go.

And things that only Carolina will ever know.

And you didn't see me here.

They never did see me here.

No, you didn't see me here.

They never saw me

Oh, Carolina knows why. For years they've said

That I was guilty as sin and slept in a liar's bed

But sleep comes fast, and I'll meet no ghosts.

It's between me, the sand, and the sea.

Carolina knows