Adolescent Necks: Detective Kalle and Eva's Shinji-kun

Nice to meet you. I'm "Osunu-san," and I love Snoopy.
I would like to write about my personal discoveries and experiences using books, movies, and other things as topics.

Summer vacation is over, but this time I will take up stories where children play an active role in the summer. (The second one is not a story, but a song.)

* "Bill Bergson, Master Detective" by Astrid Lindgren
(The old translation published in 1958 is titled "Kalle-kun's Adventure")
* "A Cruel Angel's Thesis"

The first Kalle-kun is a work by the Swedish author Lindgren, known for the "Pippi Longstocking" and "Noisy Village" series. There are three books in the Kalle-kun series, and this is the second one.
I first read Kalle-kun when I was a first-year junior high student (the old version, of course), even though I was already a full-grown woman. It was a bit childish and an old book even back then, but it was in the school library, so I gave it a read.

It is a story about Kalle-kun, who aspires to be a master detective, getting caught up in a real incident while playing the War of the Roses with his playmates during summer vacation, and solving it with his quick wit.
There are heart-pounding scenes like climbing onto a roof in the middle of the night, but the scene that remained strangely etched in my memory even after I became an adult was this one featuring the tomboy Eva-Lotta (Eva-Lotta in the old translation), the only girl in the group. I will summarize it roughly.

On a sweltering afternoon, Eva-Lotta's mother encounters her daughter at the town square just after buying cherries from a stall. The daughter grabs the cherries by the handful, pops them into her mouth one after another, and walks away with a smile, leaving a trail of pits on the ground. (In the illustrations of the old version, you can see things that look like pits at her feet.)
Watching her daughter's back as she walks away, Eva-Lotta's mother suddenly thinks something like this.

In the aforementioned War of the Roses, Kalle, Eva-Lotta, and Anders belong to the White Rose army (there are also three in the opposing Red Rose army), and Eva-Lotta was on a secret mission for the White Rose army at this time (a game, of course). During that mission, she encounters the scene of a murder. Her mother's anxiety was spot on.

Now, for the second one, "A Cruel Angel's Thesis." It is the well-known theme song for "Neon Genesis Evangelion." It might be a stretch, but Eva also has a summer vibe, doesn't it?
I happened to be watching (listening to) a video of a choir singing it, and I was struck by the lyrics of the second verse (please look them up). Oh, it's just... a quagmire of maternal love. It's from the perspective of a mother who knows she has to send her child out into the world but doesn't want them to go to a dangerous place. The "thin nape of the neck" appears here as well.

It connected in my mind to that scene with Eva-Lotta. To think that a passage I read when I didn't have a shred of maternal instinct would come back to me like this.
Why do the necks of adolescents look so thin? (I have one in my own home, too.) No matter how big they grow, they look precarious from a parent's perspective. That might be the symbol of it. And the intuition that this is the last cradle before they leave the nest.
Ah! I wonder if that doesn't apply to sturdy boys who play sports—I don't know.

By the way, according to Wikipedia, the Kalle-kun series started in 1946. It might be a classic by now. The children's parents were self-employed, postmasters, or doctors. I didn't notice it when I read it long ago, but I think you can catch glimpses of the universal environment (and problems) surrounding children, such as economic disparities in their home environments and the fact that the father of Kalle's friend Anders was violent.