Japanese Fairy Tales

A dragon king, tongue-clipped sparrow, sake-drinking tortoise, vengeful rabbit, pitiful hare, flying paper crane, and luminous beings from the moon... A dreadful goblin hag, Rin Jin the Sea King, the Dragon Queen, the Peach Boy, the ogre of Rashomon, and so on and so forth. Oodles of imagination in this book of twenty-two fairy tales translated into English by Yei Theodora Ozaki. They aren't haunting or creepy-bizarre like Lafcadio Hearn's translations and retellings of old Japanese stories; they're rather fantastic fables and parables replete with rewards of treasures for good deeds done and awful punishments doled out to the mean-spirited and unfilial. They seem more for kids than adults, and yet the language is formal and old-fashioned and the tales lack the thrills young people these days are accustomed to in reading modern fiction. The book was released in 1908 (same collection came out in 1903 under the title The Japanese Fairy Book).

About some Ozakis: Yei Theodora Ozaki's father was one of the first Japanese to receive a Western education. He and Ozaki's mother divorced a few years after they married, and their three children remained in the mother's care. Ozaki moved to Japan as a teenager and lived with her father for a few years. Apparently she would occasionally receive letters intended for an Ozaki unrelated to her. This was the Japanese politician Yukio Ozaki, known as the "father of the Japanese Constitution." Interestingly, the two later married, presumably as a result of mistakenly getting each other's mail and having to sort out the matter via their own correspondence. Yukio Ozaki was locked up at times for his anti-war views and struggled for universal suffrage. He was also mayor of Tokyo when the city gave 3020 cherry tree saplings to Washington, D.C.

Yei Theodora Ozaki

The Sound of Waves

The Sound of Waves (1954) by Yukio Mishima is a fairly slim novel that rather surprised me. After reading his Death in Midsummer and Other Stories (1953) and short story "Patriotism" (1960), both dark and philosophical, this one, by comparison, felt refreshingly light and optimistic. I didn't know he had it in him. And while the subject of suicide does come up, as an option in the mind of the young protagonist, [spoiler...] nobody offs themselves or dies in otherwise tragic circumstances, as tends to happen in his other works.

It's basically a boy-meets-girl story. Shinji is coming of age in a fishing village on Uta-jima, a small island in Ise Bay between Japan's prefectures of Mie and Aichi. He and Hatsue, a young woman who has returned to the island after training to be a pearl diver, fall in love but feel compelled to keep their relationship a secret so as not to set off the rumor mill. Alas, the mill eventually grinds into action, leaving the fate of the young lovers fraught with uncertainty.

The prose are quite beautiful and the narrative rolls in like mellow waves, creating a calming effect as you read. Mishima here also shows his talent for describing the sea and nature, and for capturing the essence of village life and young love.

Mishima won the Shincho Prize from Shinchosha Publishing for The Sound of Waves. It has been adapted for film five times (three of these are apparently very hard to track down) as well as a two-part animation.

The Memory Police

The Memory Police, a novel by Yōko Ogawa, was published in 1994 and then translated by Stephen Snyder for its 2019 release in English. This dreamlike, dystopian story unfolds in an enigmatic cloud of allegory. It's set on an isolated island plagued by a gradual extirpation of memories as well as the objects that conjure them. Roses are among the first to go, then birds and calendars, and the island folk themselves seem to fade in ways too. A few retain their memories and so they're hunted down by the Memory Police and disappeared, the exception being those who can remain in hiding.

The unnamed narrator is an author who processes her community's grim reality through the novels she writes, her characters similarly suffering losses that bring on the loss of the self. She hides her memory-capable editor at home, in a secret cubbyhole of a room accessible only through a trapdoor in the floor and by a makeshift funnel speaker. But the Memory Police, fascist and cold as the snow that covers the island ever more deeply, are out there, searching houses, enforcing the disappearances, removing all who remember what might be forever gone.

I quite liked this one for the unsettling calm that runs through it. Ogawa's sentences are simple and clear, contrasting eerily with the plight and horror conveyed through the imagery in her masterly descriptions. I was a bit frustrated midway through by the allegory. I wanted Ogawa or the narrator to explain why these terrible events were happening and what it all actually meant. But by the book's end the allegory is satisfying in its murk, giving us a fictional but much clearer picture of real-world truths—in particular about the importance of remembering and storytelling.

Yōko Ogawa