With this, I finish recapping the noteworthy and sharable parts of my Singapore trip, and can move on to the things that have been happening recently. Hopefully I finish that by Wednesday, so expect posts tomorrow as well!

Anyway, when I was still in Singapore, I managed to go to two exhibitions at the central library (although ‘exhibition’ might be a generous term for one of them).

The first was The History of Japanese Picture Books

It’s… a lot smaller than I expected.

It’s pretty cool though, since they have a wide variety of styles and picture books shown.This (below) is apparently a really old magazine called Kodomo no Kuni (kingdom of children). It took me a few seconds to realise it was read from right to left.

I really like the old picture books. They look so incredible cool!

It was quite hard to take the photo though, because of the reflections. You can probably see me in all of them ><

And this picture (below) might strike you as familiar – it’s by the illustrator of Totto Chan!! I actually want this as a print to hang up somewhere.

And this one (also below) is about a family of mice – the picture feels very Western to me, if you know what I mean.

Verdict: Nice, but not really worth making a special trip for. If you’re already at the library, though, you should definitely make a trip here. The exhibition lasts till July, if I remember correctly.

After I saw this (on the seventh floor), I went up to the eighth floor to see Growing Up With Shakespeare. I liked Merchant of Venice and King Lear when I studied them (and I probably did more, but I can’t remember any right now), so I was interested in this.

It was really tiny though – not really worth it. I guess I was expecting something more.

There was a cool Singaporean version of the plays, but… I didn’t see an overarching narrative. Like the impact of Shakespeare on the students, etc. Unless I missed something somewhere.

Both exhibitions are free, and I think they last until July, so if you’re near the Central Library and you’re interested in Japanese picture books/looking at a collection of Shakespeare, you might want to pop by. I don’t think it’s worth making a trip just for it though.