Japanese Folktales: Classic Stories from Japan's Enchanted Past

Description

Japanese Folktales is Yei Theodora Ozaki's classic collection of twenty-two traditional Japanese stories. The book introduces the reader to the rich world of the Japanese imagination, a world of ghouls, goblins and ogres; sea serpents and sea kings; kindly animals and magic birds; demons and dragons, princes and princesses. In "My Lord Bag of Rice" goldfish dancers and carp musicians delight the brave warrior Hidesato; in "The Mirror of Matsuyama" a lonely daughter endures her fate with the help of a "shining disc" given by her departed mother; "The Jelly Fish and the Monkey" explains how that sea creature lost its bones; and the hero of "Momotaro," a tale familiar to every child in Japan, is born from a peach that washes up on the riverbank. Settings and characters vary from tale to tale but the effect of each story in this volume is the same - to transport the reader, young or old, to mysterious shores, magical kingdoms, and mythical lands. Japanese Folk Tales is a wondrous introduction to Japan's rich fantasy tradition.

Yei Theodora Ozaki was the daughter of a Japanese father and an English mother. After her parents' marriage ended, Ozaki began a life of world travel, first raised by her mother in England and then her father in Japan. Later she traveled through Europe, where she began to translate the traditional Japanese stories she loved into English. She went on to translate several collections of Japanese folk tales including this one. Lucy Fraser is Lecturer in Japanese at the University of Queensland (AUS) where she teaches Japanese popular culture, literature and language. Her most recent publication is the book The Pleasures of Metamorphosis: Japanese and English Fairy Tale Transformation of "The Little Mermaid." Her research interests include animal-human interactions in Japanese fairy tale retellings.

"Drawn from many Japanese sources and enhanced with dozens of woodcut-style drawings by Tokyo artist Kakuz Fujiyama, the stories succeed in meeting Ozaki's intention "to interest young readers of the West." Most intriguing is Fraser's encouragement of a more critical reading, with an eye toward imperialist expansion, indigenous conflict, and gender inequity, issues as prevalent today as in centuries past." --Booklist