Japanese Legends and Folklore: Samurai Tales, Ghost Stories, Legends, Fairy Tales, Myths, and Historical Accounts by A. B. Mitford, and: Japanese Folktales: Classic Stories from Japan's Enchanted Past by Yei Theodora Ozaki

Abstract

Reviewed by: Japanese Legends and Folklore: Samurai Tales, Ghost Stories, Legends, Fairy Tales, Myths, and Historical Accounts by A. B. Mitford, and: Japanese Folktales: Classic Stories from Japan's Enchanted Past by Yei Theodora Ozaki Mayako Murai (bio) Japanese Legends and Folklore: Samurai Tales, Ghost Stories, Legends, Fairy Tales, Myths, and Historical Accounts. By A. B. Mitford. With a new foreword by Michael Dylan Foster, Tuttle, 2019, 320 pp. Japanese Folktales: Classic Stories from Japan's Enchanted Past. Compiled by Yei Theodora Ozaki. With a new foreword by Lucy Fraser, Tuttle, 2018, 253 pp. Originally published in 1871, Algernon Bertram Mitford's Japanese Legends and Folklore: Samurai Tales, Ghost Stories, Legends, Fairy Tales, Myths, and Historical Accounts remains an important collection of traditional narratives and historical records of Japan. Mitford was a British diplomat who was sent to Japan in 1866, when Japan was going through a radical political, economic, and cultural transformation under pressure from Western powers. As the subtitle of the book indicates, it is a miscellaneous collection of literary texts for adults: folktales, legends, myths, and his own eyewitness accounts of traditional customs. As Michael Dylan Foster states in the new foreword, Mitford's collection, which opens with the still popular historical Samurai vendetta "The Forty-Seven Rōnins," as Mitford calls it, and closes with appendixes that include his detailed description of an instance of the Samurai practice of ritual disembowelment that he witnessed, is "chock full of swordplay and other forms of violence" that he "is guilty of romanticizing" (7). To those interested in fairy-tale studies, the significance of this collection lies in its inclusion of tales and legends about yōkai monsters and shape-shifting animals, such as "The Vampire Cat of Nabēshima," "The Grateful Foxes," and "The Accomplished and Lucky Tea-Kettle," that he first introduced to Western readers and that continue to capture the imaginations of children and adults across cultures. As Forster points out, Mitford's emphasis on folklore was in line with the rising scholarly interest in oral narrative tradition in late nineteenth-century Britain and heralded the later work of such Western writers and scholars as Lafcadio Hearn and Basil Hall Chamberlain that came to overshadow Mitford's collection of Japanese tales. As Forster rightly claims, this book is still relevant today "not only because of the stories it tells of old Japan but also because of what it reveals of old England" (8). I would add that it is valuable because "what it reveals of old England" still at least partly applies to the orientalizing gaze often cast on Japanese culture today, as exemplified by the romanticized images of Samurai and hara-kiri that continue to be reimagined in various fields such as film, gaming, and travel marketing. Although there is some overlap in their selections of tales, including "The Tongue-Cut Sparrow," "The Adventures of Little Peach Boy," and "The Story of the Old Man Who Made Withered Trees to Blossom," Yei Theodora Ozaki's Japanese Fairy Tales: Classic Stories from Japan's Enchanted Past, which consists of twenty-two fairy tales and sixty-six illustrations, contrasts with Mitford's collection in several important ways. Originally published in 1903, Ozaki's [End Page 328] collection became immediately popular in Britain and North America. Ozaki was born in London in 1870 to a Japanese baron and an English woman who taught him English while he was studying in London. Ozaki moved to Japan to live with her father at the age of seventeen and, after finishing school, made her living as an English teacher and a secretary. Ozaki states in the preface that the fairy tales in this collection were translated mostly from the modern literary fairy-tale collection published by Sazanami Iwaya (she refers to him by one of his pennames, Sazanami Sanjin, mis-transliterated by her as Sadanami Sanjin), which was the most influential collection in Japan at the time. As Lucy Fraser points out in the foreword, Iwaya is often regarded as the founder of modern children's literature in Japan and was also one of the first translators of the fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Iwaya's...