Japanese Fairy Tales

A dragon king, a tongue-clipped sparrow, a sake-drinking tortoise, a vengeful rabbit, a pitiful hare, a 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. There’s oodles of imagination in this collection of twenty-two fairy tales translated into English by Yei Theodora Ozaki. They aren’t haunting or creepily bizarre like Lafcadio Hearn’s retellings of old Japanese stories; rather, they’re fantastical fables and parables, filled with rewards for good deeds and harsh punishments for the mean-spirited and unfilial. They seem more suited to children than adults, yet the language is formal and somewhat old-fashioned, and the tales lack the kinds of thrills young readers today might expect from modern fiction. The book was published in 1908 (with the same collection appearing earlier, in 1903, as The Japanese Fairy Book).

About the Ozakis: Yei Theodora Ozaki’s father was among the first Japanese to receive a Western education. He and Ozaki’s mother divorced a few years after marrying, and their three children remained in their mother’s care. Ozaki later moved to Japan as a teenager and lived with her father for a time. Apparently, she would occasionally receive letters intended for another Ozaki—Yukio Ozaki, known as the “father of the Japanese Constitution.” Interestingly, the two later married, reportedly after mistakenly getting each other’s mail and then sorting out the matter via their own correspondence. Yukio Ozaki was at times imprisoned for his anti-war views and was a strong advocate for universal suffrage. He also served as mayor of Tokyo when the city gifted 3,020 cherry tree saplings to Washington, D.C.

Yei Theodora Ozaki