by Moe Zilla

Created on: March 10, 2009   Last Updated: December 08, 2009

The illustrations remind me of Van Gogh - with extra oranges and yellows flashing in bright watercolor drawings. Walter Lyon Krudop both wrote and illustrated "The Man Who Caught Fish," and his paintings bring to life a small village in Thailand. There's huts and palm trees, with a castle in the background. It's a simple story about a stranger who arrives with a long pole, and then begins fishing in the river.

"One person, one fish," he says, handing slippery fish to the hungry townspeople - even though the other fishermen had caught little all season. Soon the king hears of the stranger, and arrives expecting "a royal ceremony" in which he receives a king-sized portion of the stranger's catch. But instead the stranger sticks to his creed. "One person, one fish."

It's a familiar story, but the colorful illustrations give it an extra liveliness. There's an enormous jade fish that the king commissions to entice the stranger to give him a full basket of fish. The king rides in a gold sedan, which is sometimes carried by an elephant. And when the king is entertained by dancers, there's an enormous red curtain that's speckled with a pattern of gold.

Even when the fisherman is jailed, he's only seen in the golden light of the lamp a guard brings. It's really the story of the king, who sits surrounded by rich ornaments, brooding over his inability to earn an extra allotment of food. And in the end, he'll be punished for his pride, in an even more familiar fairy tale twist.

When I was five I heard the story of the fisherman and his wife. The fish promises to grant wishes, but the fisherman's wife is so greedy that she's punished by the fish instead. It turns out that Walter Lyon Krudop is telling his own version of the story. The fisherman had once been a king himself, until he was cursed for his pride to be the one who wields the magical pole.

"[U]ntil I found another person as proud as I once was."

These stories always seem a little harsh to me. The king is unable to release the pole - his hand would not let it go, and instead its line falls in the water, where it instantly pulls up a fish. "'Remember', the stranger called over his shoulder. 'One person, one fish.'" And in the final drawing he's walking away, down a yellow road lit by a distant moon. The clouds are orange and the fields are green, but a nearby cow is seen only in silhouette, so there's blackness on its shadowed side and the shadow it casts on the ground. It's a spot of darkness that intrudes on an otherwise colorful painting.

But it also seems like a metaphor for the darkness at the end of the story.

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