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A review by joeytitmouse
Japanese Fairy Tales by Yei Theodora Ozaki
4.0
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?
-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?