Things I learnt from Japanese Fairy Tales-Never trust a monkey.-Never trust a stepmother.-Never trust a stepmother with your monkey.-Almost every boy in Japan is named Taro, or a variant of that name: Kintaro, Urashima Taro, Momotaro...-If an old man wants to wrestle your teenage son in the woods (because the old man was watching the boy earlier and saw that he was big and strong), it's perfectly fine to send your son to the capital alone with the old man.-Take care of your elders.-Something somewhat absent from Western Fairy Tales (unless I'm mistaken), but evil people can change their ways and become good, through character building. Really the dichotomy of good and evil isn't as black and white.-The Dragon King of the Sea lives beyond the sea in a beautiful underwater palace that somehow has air and fish attendants and no monkeys.-When someone with magical powers tells you not to open a box, for the love of Buddha don't open it!-Anything can walk and talk. Even a mortar.-The jellyfish lost his spine because he trusted a monkey.The translation is interesting. It is clearly written for an early 20th century western audience, who would be only vaguely familiar with Japanese customs. The author's history is an interesting note, she's pretty much precisely half-English half-Japanese, in both genetics and upbringing. She was born to an English mother and Japanese father, who separated soon after birth, so she spent her formative years in England, her teenage years in Japan, and the rest of her life in all place in between. Her marriage story is interesting : She kept on getting some other guy's mail in Japan who had the same last name as her, they eventually met and married. Cute.I'm not a fan of the bracket translations of common Japanese words, not only are they unhelpful (maybe to a 21st century adult reader though), I mean, Samurai? But they are also strangely inconsistent. In "The Happy Hunter and the Skillful Fisher" we have "Mikoto" translated as "Augustness" (yea, a kid would totally that) almost every time. So the first few times she writes the term she then translates it in brackets, then a few times alone, then goes back to translation. I think we got it the first time!But all in all, entertaining. It's neat to see folk stories from the other side of the world, and see how different yet how similar they all are. Definitely getting dated, but aren't all fairy tales supposed to be dated?
As a child I was never too keen on classic fairy tales. I took me many years to take interest in them for their common, archetypical elements and anthropological and social subtext. That is what I wanted from “Japanese Fairy Tales” as well: to compare them to my expectations as a reader more familiar with the Western fairy tale canon. The building bricks were mostly the same: brave and strong princes, obedient daughters, stepmothers, quests for fortune, kind old people and their other-worldly foster children, animals with their specific character traits. The structure though was relatively uncommon: Where I would have expected a plot twist, a turn of events, a dramatic conflict or a retardation of the narrative, mostly nothing came. Somehow everything was just too easy – e.g. no double failure before succeeding the third time, no spokes in our heroes’ wheels, no one to challenge them in spite of their fame and glory. Every potential conflict dribbled away into nothing. Maybe exactly that is the reason why I soon grew tired of the repetitiveness and an overly linear pattern.After my shortly developed boredom came irritation. Most of the tales strongly focus on very few or one dominant character trait (like cunningness or humbleness). Still, the very same reoccurring features like arrogance, cruelty and selfishness are fatal faults for the antagonists, yet the source of great honour and respect to positively marked characters. Like there is no true obstacle for the hero, there is also no penance or repercussion for their immoral and inhumane actions. And for my taste too many of those grand idols display capricious malice and are rewarded for it.
Do You like book Japanese Fairy Tales (2007)?
Typos are disappointing; clearly, the editor fell asleep on this one. However, the stories themselves are really interesting. Quite a few of them seem to end rather abruptly, and I can't decide if details were left out because of language barriers or if that's just the way Japanese fairytales go. It makes them jarring, even for short stories (which I dislike to begin with, because I always want them to last so much longer).The further in I get, the more difficult it becomes to pay attention. Some of the stories are cool and some of them seem kind of pointless. Maybe I should just stop trying to convince myself that I like short stories. It might just be the awful editing. My favorite was when they substituted "poop" for "poor". It's probably somewhere between two and three stars for me, but because only one or two of the tales really stuck with me (in a good way), I think it's closer to an overall 2. A pity, because I like fairytales generally, just think the bad editing really ruined this one.
—Kay
Delightful collection of fairy tales from the Land of The Rising Sun. As with all fairy tales, there are numerous quirky characters and unusual adventures - always with a lesson to be learnt or moral to be taught. I couldn't help but imagine these characters as Studio Ghibli creations - I was glad to hear that my favourite story in this collection (The Bamboo Cutter and the Moon Child) was made into an full-length animated movie by them recently. The writing is easy to read and follow and recommend for children of all ages.
—Prasidh Ramson
Fairy tales filled with lessons of honor, repentance, justice, compassion. Seems that every culture has a tale in which an innocent character is warned:..."whatever happens don't go near or look into the inner room". And what always happens? Of course they look! Well, no good has ever come from that...Yei Theodora Ozaki, the author/translator, states that "This collection of Japanese fairy tales is the outcome of a suggestion made to me indirectly through a friend by Mr. Andrew Lang." But unlike Lang (known for his "color" fairy books) who replaced foreign words in worldly tales with more commonly accepted western terms, Ms. Ozaki westernized the tales while preserving the eastern flavor; keeping the Japanese words/names and explaining their meaning and significance. This, to me, is the magical element.
—Monica
