My Bride Is a Mermaid: Season One, Part One

July 15, 2010 — Zack Davisson

 
4.0 out of 5 stars The Bride of Seto
 

My Bride Is a Mermaid: Season One, Part One

If Jr. High School student Nagasumi Michishio watched as much anime as I do, it should have come as no surprise to him that a seemingly harmless family vacation to the Seto Inland Sea would result in an engagement to a beautiful, sweet girl whose family is made up of the local yakuza clan all of which who happen to be merfolk. I mean, this kind of stuff happens all the time, right?

So yeah, “My Bride is a Mermaid” (Japanese title “Seto no Hanayome” or “The Bride of Seto”) is one of those kinds of anime. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good. When working in an established genre, it is really a question of how good they do the genre, and this series does a great job.

The Magical Girl/Harem combo can be done for romance (Ah! My Goddess or an overdose of fan service (Eiken) or for straight-out comedy which is what “My Bride is a Mermaid” goes for. Based on the manga of the same name by Tahiko Kimura., this series is almost a parody of the genre and delivers some good laughs with the many bizarre situations Nagasumi finds himself in. The undersea humor reminded me a lot of One Piece more than anything else, with the romantic element thrown in. “My Bride is a Mermaid” is pretty much a fan service -free anime, with maybe just the slightest hint of it here or there if you squint your eyes, but that is about it.

The story is basic: Nagasumi and his family go for vacation to the Seto Inland Sea, where Nagasumi almost drowns and finds himself rescued by a beautiful mermaid. No one believes his story until that same mermaid, named Seto and with legs this time, shows up at his doorstep and begs for Nagasumi to accept her as his fiancé. The merfolk have a code, it seems, of killing any human that sees them in their nautical form, and the only way around it is for Nagasumi to take Seto as his bride. Marry the beautiful girl or be killed. Of course, to complicate matters Seto’s family is also the local yakuza clan, and Seto’s father would much rather see Nagasumi dead than give away his precious daughter.

Nagasumi and Seto are only engaged, not married, so they spend time going on dates and Seto eventually returns with Nagasumi to his hometown of Saitama to attend school with him and get to know him in preparation for their future. Seto’s family isn’t going to let her go off alone, however, and they soon show up to wreck havoc on Nagasumi’s school life. Of course, there are some human girls back at school that fancy Nagasumi as well, and a rival mermaid shows up to give Seto a battle for Nagasumi, who she wants to take as her manservant. Hijinks ensue.

There is all sorts of good comedy packed into this series. Seto has legs only so long as her feet don’t get wet, which means that water is flying everywhere during the series. Seto’s bodyguard Maki is a tiny little elf-girl that lives in a spiral shell but comes out sword a swinging every time she thinks Nagasumi is over-stepping his bounds. The series relies a lot on running gags and playing around with the genre tropes, such as Nagasumi getting his “first kiss” stolen by male yakuza member Masa so Nagasumi is rendered as a “bishonen” -type whenever Masa shows up. When Seto gets serious, she is suddenly shrouded in darkness and accompanied by falling cherry blossoms, which leads the other characters to wonder where all the blossoms are coming from. There are two transformed-animal yakuza members, Shark Fujishiro and Octopus Nakajima who are exactly what their names sound like.

The only complaint I have with “My Bride is a Mermaid” is with the subtitles. Japanese is a language with many regional dialects, and too often translators feel compelled to use various English accents or way of speaking to capture this. It doesn’t work. Even though Sun and her family speak perfectly polite Japanese using the dialect local to Seto, the subtitles have them speaking like a bunch of hillbillies saying things like “yer gonna get it” or other ridiculous phrases. When Sun says “Watashi was Nagasumi no tsuma ni naru” the subtitles says “I’m yer future wife” which is not at all correct. She doesn’t speak like an uneducated country bumbkin. I don’t mind it if this kind of translations is used when done for effect, like when the tiny Maki talks in her “yakuza voice” when trying to be intimidating but then switches back to normal Japanese, but putting those words in Sun’s mouth all the time just doesn’t work.

This release by Funimation has the first 13 episodes of the 26-episode series originally released in 2007. The series is continued in My Bride Is a Mermaid: Season One, Part Two. Although the boxsets say “Season One,” there actually is no “Season Two” following up this anime There were two OVA releases in 2008 and 2009, although I don’t know if there are plans to release these as well, but it is possible they would be released as a limited “Season Two,” but they would be very short and non-continuous.
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The Kappa Child

June 25, 2010 — Zack Davisson

5.0 out of 5 stars As green as the kappa’s love for cucumbers

The Kappa Child (Fiction)

This is one of those kinds of books. The kind where you find yourself standing in front of the elevator in the morning, balancing the pain of being a few minutes late for work and the pleasure of getting just a few more pages in before you start your day, and the book always wins. This is, in short, a good book.

I must confess that I am not entirely an unbiased reviewer, Oh, I have never met author Hiromi Goto nor even heard of her before I cracked the pages of “The Kappa Child,” but there is one thing. I do love kappa. I have a sizable kappa collection that takes up several shelves, and I have read many, many books on/about kappa from Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa to Kunio Yanagita’s The Legends of Tono to the children’s environmental book The Last Kappa of Old Japan. While this would seem to make me predisposed to “Kappa Child,” it is actually the opposite. I have a Master’s Degree in Japanese folklore, and I tend to be a very strict critic of those who don’t deal with my favorite beasties correctly.

Hiromi Goto obviously likes kappa too, as seen by her children’s novel The Water Of Possibility (In the Same Boat). Fortunately, Goto deals with the creatures in a way of respect and tradition for the source material, and accurate in every way. But where “The Water of Possibility” combined Japanese folklore with a tiny Canadian village in an innocent childish way, “The Kappa Child” is a grown up book dealing with adult themes of sex, brutality and isolation, as well as love and redemption. I found this particularly suiting for a creature who is both a monster and a friend, a trickster and a helper. Never before have I seen the multi-faceted aspects of kappa so perfectly dealt with.

The book very much falls into the genre of Magical Realism, but the magic here is the magic found in a small seed that has the ability to metamorphis from a hard brown stone to a lush green life-giving plant. It is a moving book about transformation, about human potential and the ability of those around us to either stunt or encourage that potential.

The story is complicated, telling the trials of a Japanese family who immigrated to Canada, with the father intent on being the first person to grow Japanese rice from the hard dust-bowl. Through force of will he thinks he can defy nature and bring forth wet life from the dry clay, and is more than willing to beat down anyone that challenges him or defies him. His three daughters live in fear of their father, growing up in the prairies to become dysfunctional adults, each shaped in their own way by their upbringing.

As adults, they gather together only for holidays, resenting their parents and the forced ritual of homecoming. But this year for the first time something is different. One of the daughters is coming home secretly pregnant, although she has no explanation for her condition. All that she knows is there was a strange encounter one night with someone that was small and green, and that four months later a small voice speaks to her from inside her womb, craving Japanese cucumbers and the water that is life. She does not know if she is going mad, or if through some circumstances she is truly pregnant with a kappa child.

“Kappa Child” is filled with all sorts of characters the kinds of which you could only find in books. The four sisters, who found their Japanese names unpronounceable, gave themselves nicknames based on their zodiac signs. The oldest sister, Slither (Snake), is obsessed with physical beauty and escaped the earliest from the prairie hell. The second daughter and main character remains nameless, but she is a strange recluse who dresses exclusively in pajamas and hides her “pumpkin toothed smile” from the world, working a job collecting stray shopping carts in her milk truck until the one magical night changes her. The other sisters, PG (Pig Girl, named for the sign of the Boar) whose lazy eye can see hidden things and Mice (for the Mouse sign) who rarely speaks except to imitate a dog.

The story of this family moves back from the present to the past, touching on the protagonists magical pregnancy and the circumstances that created the odd family. If there are any complaints to be made about “The Kappa Child,” it is that Goto’s writing style can be somewhat hard to get into. She favors staccato sentences, and places her periods where she wants them and not where grammar dictates. Also, there is un-translated Japanese dialog here, which I had no problem with as a Japanese speaker but might be distracting to other readers who want to know what the mother is saying.

It is hard to talk too much about the plot without spoiling the many magical moments in “The Kappa Child,” but it can be said that there are UFO abductions, naked sumo matches under the last lunar eclipse of the millennium, and love found where it is least expected. The end of the book took me by surprise, but on reflection could not have ended any other way.

All of those scenes are what really hooked me with “The Kappa Child.” There were more than a few that were so magical, so beautifully written that I found myself walking down the street grinning like an idiot while reading, oblivious to everything else. Goto pulled me into her world, and it was a place that I liked being in.

One a final note, “The Kappa Child” has one of the most brilliant covers I can remember seeing. Cover designer Duncan Campbell has hidden his own piece of magic on the cover, and just like the magic in “The Kappa Child” it is up to you to find it.

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The East Asian Story Finder

April 26, 2010 — Zack Davisson

5.0 out of 5 stars A fantastic resource for educators and folklore enthusiasts

East Asian Story Finder: A Guide to Tales from China, Japan and Korea, Listing Subjects and Sources

I am passionate enough about Japanese folklore that I got a Master’s Degree in it, and while my library of stories is pretty extensive, every now and then I discover a gem that had previously gone under my radar.

“The East Asian Story Finder” is just such a gem. A follow-up to the award-winning The Jewish Story Finder, children’s librarian Sharon Barcan Elswit had combed the world for English-language translations of stories from Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan, then meticulously cross-referenced and categorized all 468 tales she assembled.

Elswit does not tell the entire story, but always gives a reference as to where that particular story can be found. Instead, she provides a brief synopsis of the story, listing known variations if applicable, and assigns a series of subjects to each story that can then be referenced. Subjects can be general, like “burial” or “butterflies,” or more specific like “talking bird,” “breath of death,” “”Cinderella stories,” “charcoal makers,” or “propitious births.” The Subject Index in the back shows which stories contain which subjects, making for easy reference. All of the stories are also chucked together by overall theme, such as “The Way Things Are,” “The Problem Solvers,” “Strange Events and Ghostly Encounters” and “Tricksters and Fools.”

Many of the stories here are culled from familiar English translations, such as Theodora Ozeki’s 1903 book Japanese Fairy Tales and Grace James’ 1923 The Moon Maiden and Other Japanese Fairy Tales. Elswit points out that the age of these books makes the majority of them public domain, and that many of the full stories can be searched for on the internet without the need to buy them. In her introduction, Elswit notes that any translation somewhat compromises the original intent of the story, and especially older translations which were more liberal in their use of fantasy-words like “knight,” “fairy,” “ogre” and such, but she did try and locate the best translation available.

Clearly, there are more than 468 fairy tales from all of East Asia, and Elswit explains her selection criteria. They had to be stories with a universal appeal, something that was not depended on knowing intimate details of the culture and language. She eliminated stories that only explained a local landscape feature, for example, or were intended to illuminate a certain religious point. She also struggled with her identification of “East Asia,” but finally settled on the political regions of Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan instead of the more than sixty different ethnicities and cultures in that region. She does specify if possible when the story is Tibetan or from the native Japanese Ainu culture.

Many of the stories here were familiar, but there were even more that I had never heard of. Even though there is only a synopsis for each story, I have enjoyed reading through them and have tracked down the originals for more than a few.

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Kwaidan: Ghost Stories and Strange Tales of Old Japan

April 9, 2010 — Zack Davisson

Kwaidan: Ghost Stories and Strange Tales of Old Japan (Dover Books on Literature & Drama)

5.0 out of 5 stars Japan’s most famous collection of ghost and monster tales

“Kwaidan” is Lafcadio Hearn’s most famous book, and justifiably so. It is the least academic of his works, collecting together some of Japan’s core ghost and monster stories into one slim volume. Much like the Brothers Grimm, Hearn did not actually create these stories but rather compiled them and put them into written form for the first time, learning them from folk tales and storytellers.

Because it is in the Public Domain, there are innumerable different versions available of Lafcadio Hearn’s seminal “Kwaidan,” including several free versions available online. Anyone interested in Japanese folklore or Japanese literature or even Japan in general is going to need a copy of “Kwaidan” in their collection. That is just a given. But it is difficult to know which one to choose.

This edition, from Dover Publishing, is a nice book featuring the full unabridged text of the original 1904 publication. This version carries the subtitle “Ghost Stories and Strange Tales of Old Japan” which is different from Hearn’s subtitle “Stories and Studies of Strange Things,” but that is the only difference.

The illustrations are the real selling point for this particular edition, being created by illustrator Yasumasa Fujita for the artesian publisher Shimbi Shoin in Tokyo, active from the 1860s to the 1930s. Yasumasa created a silk-bound version of “Kwaidan” with his illustrations as a high-end collectible book. While the original release with Yasumasa’s illustration fetches hundreds of dollars on the collectible market, here you get the same illustrations (although in black-and-white instead of the original color plates) along with Hearn’s original text.

Along with being his most famous, “Kwaidan” is Hearn’s most influential book. “The Story of Mimi-nashi Hoichi” is as well-known in Japan as “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is in the United States. The “Yuki Onna” has made it into a few films, including Kurosawa’s Dreams and the filmed version of this book, Kwaidan.

The stories themselves are of excellent quality, ranging from spooky ghost tales to humorous tales of wandering monks encountering monsters. Along with the stories are three insect studies, the likes of which can be found in all Hearn books. These are excellent academic studies of insects in traditional Japanese folk lore, including children’s songs and haiku poetry involving insects.

Each story ranges from 5-15 pages long. Included are:

The story of Mimi-nashi Hoichi
Oshidori
The story of O-Tei
Ubazakura
Diplomacy
Of a mirror and a bell
Jikininki
Mujina
Rokuro-kubi
A dead secret
Yuki-Onna
The story of Aoyagi
Jiu-Roku-Zakura
The dream of Akinosuke
Riki-Baba
Hi-Mawari
Horai

Insect Studies -
Butterfiles
Mosquitos
Ants

Posted in Japanese History, Japanese Literature. Tags: , . 2 Comments »

The Legends of Tono: 100th Anniversary Edition

March 25, 2010 — Zack Davisson

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the classics of Japanese folklore

The Legends of Tono: 100th Anniversary Edition

Much of what we know of Japanese folklore might have been lost forever if it were not for two authors, Lafcadio Hearn and Kunio Yanagita. Both were avid collectors of the mysterious tales of weird and imaginative creatures that were passed down as oral folklore but never written down. Both did their work at the start of the Meiji era, a time when, in the name of modernization, the government and scholars of Japan were actively attempting to wipe out the beliefs and superstitions of previous eras which were thought to be embarrassing to a country entering the modern age.

“The Legends of Tono” (Japanese title “Tono Monogatari”) is the most famous of Yanagita’s works, collecting the narratives of the small town of Tono in Iwate prefecture, as told to him by local resident and storyteller Kizen Sasaki. The stories collected in “The Legends of Tono” include some of Japan’s most famous monsters like the kappa and the child-ghosts zashiki-warashi. Along with Hearn’s Kwaidan: Stories And Studies Of Strange Things and Ueda Akinari’s Tales of Moonlight and Rain, “The Legends of Tono” is one of the most classic and important books on Japanese folklore.

A surprisingly small book for one that carries so much weight, there are exactly one hundred and nineteen legends spread out over fifty-eight pages. Many of these legends are only a sentence in length, and often there are three to four different legends on a page. Some of them are a bit longer, maybe a paragraph or two, and typical of Japanese folklore they do not tell a complete story but rather just describe an odd circumstance or the history behind some strange stone or tree local to a certain village. Many explain customs of the time in Tono village, and the movements of household gods and festivals. Some are sexual cautionary tales, and other frights designed to keep people in their proper place for fear of punishment. Yanagita’s style was to record the legends in a straight-forward manner without decoration and little elaboration.

However, packed inside Yanagita’s short sentences is an ocean of depth, one that is almost impossible to know just through a quick reading. Indeed, in Japanese there are annotated versions of “The Legends of Tono” that go on for four hundred pages or more digging into each of Yanagita’s terse sentences as if mining for gold. His simple and direct writing style would become a massive influence on author Mishima Yukio (The Sailor who fell from grace with the sea) who considered “The Legends of Tono” to be the finest-written work of Japanese literature.

There was more to “The Legends of Tono” than simple folklore gathering and writing however. This was a book with a political agenda. Yanagita was protesting against official histories at the time, which concentrated only on the rich and powerful and ignored the lives and hopes of the millions of poor peasants who, in the words of someone with similar inclinations, “did most of the living and dying” in Japan. Yanagita did not want to see the stories of these people lost to the tides of time, and so he gathered them up and wrote them down for future generations.

This “100th Anniversary Edition” celebrates the original 1910 publication of “The Legends of Tono.” It reprints the 1975 translation prepared by Yanagita-scholar Ronald A. Morse. Morse includes a preface to the 100th Anniversary Edition, the original forward to the 1975 edition written by Richard M. Dorson who had actually worked and studied with Yanagita, and a new introduction discussing the relevance of Yanagita’s work today. These three introductions add a bit of bulk to the publication, and some background on Yanagita and his relevance.

Morse also includes a “Guide to English-Language Writings on Kunio Yanagita and “The Legends of Tono”" in the back of the book for those interested in pursuing further study on the man and his works.

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Hanako and the Terror of Allegory Volume 1

February 16, 2010 — Zack Davisson

Hanako and the Terror of Allegory Volume 1 (Hanako & the Terror of Allegory)

 
3.0 out of 5 stars The Terror of a Bad Translation
 
After seeing the preview in Deadman Wonderland Volume 1, I was really looking forward to “Hanako and the Terror of Allegory.” After all, the series was being done by Esuno Sakae, the creator of Future Diary, which is a series I absolutely love, and the topic was Japanese folklore, which I love so much I got a Master’s Degree in it. But unfortunately this first volume in the series just didn’t deliver.

The story opens with Hiranuma Kanae, a young girl who is being hunted by “The Man under the Bed with an Axe.” She knows that the story is nothing more than an urban legend, but her belief in it is so strong that it has manifested in reality. Through a rumor in an internet chat room, Kanae locates Aso Daisuke, the Allegory Detective. Daisuke specializes in cases like Kanae’s in ridding the world of what he calls “Allegories,” stories that have taken on a life of their own due to intense belief. Daisuke destroys the allegories by creating a situation where the believer is forced to confront the allegory, acknowledging that the allegory is nothing by a creation of the believer’s subconscious, and that active disbelieve dispels the threat.

Kanae soon joins the staff, and Daisuke, Kanae and his assistant Hanako head off to tackle more allegory cases. There are three stories in this volume, all based on Japanese urban legends. The first one is “The Man under the Bed with an Axe,” followed by the ubiquitous “Slit-Mouthed Woman” (“kuchisake onna”) and finally the “Human-faced Fish” known as “jinmengyo” in Japanese which is a popular legend that pops up in the news from time to time.

All of that seems pretty cool, which is why I was looking forward to the comic so much, but there is just too much here that doesn’t work.

To start off, “Hanako and the Terror of Allegory” is saddled with a really sub-par translation. I don’t know if the translator, Yamashiita Satsuki, is a native speaker of English or not but the translation is really stilted and lacks fluency. The whole comic reads like the words were looked up individually then assembled with proper English grammar but without any emotion or sense of storytelling in English.

Next, the series doesn’t quite commit one way or the other to being a supernatural comic or a high-tech comic. The “Hanako” in the title “Hanako and the Terror of Allegories” is an Allegory herself, specifically “Hanako-san in the Toilet,” which is an urban myth similar to “Bloody Mary” ie if you repeat the spirit’s name a proscribed number of times in the bathroom alone, the spirit will appear. However, aside from the backstory, this Hanako is a computer genius who spends her time making a “de-visualize program” for the allegories that strip them of their allegorical nature and allow the believers to see them for what they truly are.

At first I thought the series was going to be something like Fables, with the fairy-tale creatures being real, but instead the “de-visualize program” reveals that the allegories have no independent existence, and are nothing more than psychological projections of the believers. This forces the series to collapse under its own internal logic, because if Hanako is herself an allegory, wouldn’t the “de-visualize program” destroy her as well? And as all of the rest of the allegories have some specific target, some human being with enough belief to cause them to manifest, who is manifesting Hanako?

And while I was familiar with all of these legends, they are very Japan-specific, and the text offers little explanation for new readers. While everyone might recognize or understand “The Man under the Bed” and there have been a few movies released for The Slit-Mouthed Woman, I highly doubt many Western readers would be familiar with “Hanako from the Toilet” or “The Human-faced Fish.” There is a single page at the end of the book giving a short explanation of some of the myths, but it really isn’t enough. A good translator will make endnotes to deal with some of the cultural ambiguities, but that doesn’t happen here.

Maybe all of this will be fixed in future volumes, and I have learned not to give up on a series after the first volume. There are some nice Lovecraftian notes, especially with the “Human-faced fish” episode, and I always appreciate that. A new translator would definitely be the first order of business. However, as it stands there isn’t so much to recommend for “Hanako and the Terror of Allegory.”
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Yokai Attack!: The Japanese Monster Survival Guide

December 29, 2009 — Zack Davisson

4.0 out of 5 stars Night parade of 100 demons

Japan is a monster country. While other countries may have their vampires and wolfmen, their unseelie courts and ogres and giants, Japan is home to a traditional eight million different varieties of spooks and lurkers in the dark. Japanese children obsess on them and memorize them the way American children do dinosaurs, and you would be hard-pressed to find a child without at least one of the ubiquitous tomes detailing their haunting places and special attributes.

“Yokai Attack! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide” (subtitled “A survival guide for foreigners”, although this is only subtly written in Japanese), is one of the few books available on this traditional aspect of Japanese culture. Emulating such books as The Zombie Survival Guide, it takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to the bizarre menagerie. It acts like a video game guide, giving statistics such as height, weight, favorite food, method of attack, surviving an encounter, etc…A total of forty-six yokai get the treatment, from the famous beasties like the kappa and tengu, to the lesser-knowns like the dorotabo and the hashi hime.

This is very much a “flipping book”, not to be read in one sitting but going through checking out the yokai who catch one’s eye. Every entry is accompanied by an illustration, by Morino Tatsuya. Morino was an assistant to the yokai-master Mizuki Shigeru, and while his ability is not at Mizuki’s level he does a good job with the style. All of the illustrations are in color, and are often accompanied by older artwork such as ukiyo-e prints and toys featuring the various yokai.

When reading this book, I was of two minds. One the one hand, it is pretty cool to have an English-language introduction to yokai in any form. One the other hand, I would have been so much better to simply translate any of Mizuki Shigeru’s numerous beautiful and authentic books dealing with the subject. The idea of a “survival guide” works great when dealing with a familiar topic like zombies, but seeing as how most Westerners would be unfamiliar with yokai a more straight forward book might have been better.

People just looking for a fun and casual book will find this a treasure, however. Yokai appear quite often in Japanese video games and anime, and this kind of book would be a perfect resource to those who want to learn a little bit more about what they are seeing. It would also be a great guide book for role playing gamers who want to introduce a Japanese flavor to their campaigns.

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Kappa

December 22, 2009 — Zack Davisson

5.0 out of 5 stars The distorted mirror of Kappaland

“Kappa” is told from the point of view of Patient 23, an asylum inmate who tells of his incredible journey into the heart of Kappaland, peopled by the Kappa, the magical creatures of Japanese folklore.

In the tradition of “Gulliver’s Travels,” inside Kappaland, Akutagawa, author of “Rashomon” and “In the Grove,” has created a twisted reflection of both his contemporary Japanese society and his own self-loathing. It has been a difficult tale to interpret in Japan, being hailed as either a children’s story, a social satire or simply weird. Akutagawa himself feared insanity due to his mother’s mental deterioration during his youth, and his own justified fear of the taint of madness in his blood.

Akutagawa’s mental state when writing “Kappa” is important background, and the paperback edition comes with an extensive mini-biography of the famous author that is almost the size of the story itself. Akutagawa never wrote novels, and it is strange to see a single story packaged in one book. The introduction/biography is well written as well, and helps to reveal the story.

The writing in “Kappa” is sharp and quick-witted. The satire is equal parts clever and odd. Religion, marriage, arts and entertainment, all are in part skewered and skewed. The book is an incredibly fast read, and one that you will want to pass to your friends to read as well, so that you can see what someone else makes of it.

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The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter

October 6, 2009 — Zack Davisson

bamboo

5.0 out of 5 stars A subtle blend of story and art

The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (Kodansha’s Illustrated Japanese Classics)

This is an elegant package. The story is a classic Japanese folktale interpreted by one of Japan’s greatest writers. A cautionary tale about love between humans and spirits, it is a well paced story, calm and quiet like a new moon. The text is balanced with the original Japanese script on one side and the English translation on the other. Interspersed though out are beautiful paper-cut illustrations. “Tale of the Bamboo Cutter” is very much a piece of book art.

The only drawback of this edition is the size. It is small, and would have benefited from a hard-backed coffee table edition. As it is, it is too fragile to be a child’s book.

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The Moon Maiden and Other Japanese Fairy Tales

September 4, 2009 — Zack Davisson

moon

 

 
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully illustrated collection of Japanese fairly tales
 
Originally published in 1923 under the title “Green Willow and Other Japanese Fairy Tales,” Grace James collected various Japanese fairly tales and re-wrote them to match the style of Western British children’s literature of the time. As a result, “The Moon Maiden and Other Japanese Fairy Tales” is one of the least authentic yet most readable and child-appropriate books in the genre.

The stories are a mix of Japanese legends from various sources such as the The Kojiki, known in English as The Records of Ancient Matters, Lafcadio Hearn’s books such as Kwaidan: Ghost Stories and Strange Tales of Old Japan, and various other native fantastic stories. There are thirty stories in all, most of which take up a few pages at most.

Included are the various origin stories of Japan, such as the creation of the country by the gods Izanagi and Izanami, as well legends such as the creation of the jellyfish, the tanuki tea-kettle, the Bell of Dojoji and Urashimataro who is Japan’s Rip van Winkle character. Some ghost stories are included, such as The Peony Lantern and Karma, and a few monster legends such as The Cold Woman, which is a retelling of Hearn’s Yuki-onna.

James’s writing style is very light and easy, and her word choices help establish a fairy-tale mood. She tends to use very fanciful translations, such as calling Otsuyu from The Peony Lantern “The Lady of the Morning Dew” and always refers to the Emperor as “The Mikado” or the “August Child,” all of which are appropriate terms but rarely directly translated.

One of the real treasures of this Dover edition of “The Moon Maiden and Other Japanese Fairy Tales” is the inclusion of all sixteen color illustrations by artist Warwick Goble. The pictures are really beautiful, and capture the magic of the stories perfectly, as presented by Grace James. Many of these re-print editions come with black-and-white illustrations in order to save money, so I was thrilled to see them here as originally intended.

If you are seeking authenticity then “The Moon Maiden and Other Japanese Fairy Tales” is probably not the book for you. There are many other books that present the legends as they are, such as the scholarly Myths and Legends of Japan or the sociological Tales of Old Japan. However, if you just want to drift away to fantasyland or have a child interested in Japan but not interested in studying about Japan, then this is the perfect book.
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