Reality in Japanese Folktales

Abstract

In his book Miirchen und Wirklichkeit (Wiesbaden 1956) Lutz Rohrich examined the folktales with regard to their content of believed reality, in other words, he wanted to find an answer to the question: how much of the fairy tales was or still is the object of religious belief. Among other things he found that the aitiological or explanatory tales form the broadest basis which connects the tales of the Western and westernized world with the world of the primitive peoples. In them a lasting phenomenon of nature is taken as the result of a certain single event that happened long ago to explain the present condition. Concerning the degree of religious reality which they contain, Rohrich puts the tales of the civilized West in contrast to those of the primitives and only in passing, for lack of more spade work done among them and translations available, referring to the old and great South and East Asian civilizations. Only with regard to India is the author in a more favorable position. Deriving his information on the narratives of the Hindu from the book of Hertel Indische Marchen (Dusseldorf, 1954), Rohrich is of the opinion that for the Hindu there is no clearly defined boundary line between history and fairy tales.'