Japanese Tales from Times Past: Stories of Fantasy and Folklore from the Konjaku Monogatari Shu (90 Stories Included)

(Paperback)

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The most famous work in all of Japanese classical literature, the Konjaku Monogatari Shu is as integral a part of its nation's culture as Canterbury Tales and The Inferno are of ours. In Japanese Tales from Times Past, the editors and translators have winnowed down this massive cycle of traditional folklore from the original's 1,039 stories to ninety powerfully entertaining tales that are widely regarded as literary masterpieces of lasting interest to both general and scholarly readers. These stories are filled with keen psychological insights, wry sarcasm, and scarcely veiled criticisms of the clergy, nobles, and peasants alike, suggesting that there are, among all classes and peoples, similar failings of pride, vanity, superstition and greedas well as aspirations toward higher moral goals. Japanese Tales from Times Past marks the first time such a large selection has been translated and published for an English-reading audience. In their enlightening introduction, the editors highlight how many of the era's most pressing social concernsincluding the teaching of Buddhism, attitudes toward environmental ecology, and feminismare still deeply relevant today.

Reviews

"Naoshi Koriyama and Bruce Allen have repackaged Konjaku Monogatari Shu in a way that both retains the compelling sense of history in these ancient tales and vivifies their relevance to human experience in the twenty-first century. Through well told and carefully translated stories, we become more conscious of who we are and our intricate relationships to the world." --Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA, editor, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
"These masterful, elegant translations of ninety extraordinary tales from the Konjaku Monogatari Shu--one of the most valued works of classical Japanese literature--contribute significantly to our understandings of premodern Japanese culture and religion. They also give us an unprecedented glimpse into the daily lives of early Japan's common people, those obscured in the Tale of Genji and other celebrated classics. Most significant in our age of ecological crisis, the Konjaku tales, referencing major ecological transformations of the Japanese countryside, reveal the tensions between religion's spiritual callings to preserve nature and the human need to hunt, fish, and farm to survive." --Karen Thornber, Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, author of Ecoambiguity

Author Bio

Naoshi Koriyama taught at Toyo University in Tokyo from 1961-1997 and is professor emeritus. He is the translator of Like Underground Water: The Poetry of Mid-Twentieth Century Japan and numerous other books of verse.

Bruce Allen is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Seisen University in Tokyo. He has translated several of the works of Japanese writer Ishimure Michiko, including her novel Lake of Heaven.