Here are my favorites from the second half of the Japanese Fairy Tales (Lang) unit:
Schippeitaro: This was a nice story with a happy ending. It features a dog as the minor hero who lends his name to the title. He defeats the evil cat mountain spirit, who has been eating the village girls, with the help of the nameless main character. Although, he saves some poor girl from being eaten by the giant cat spirit, the girl mor her parents do not offer her to the man as a reward for his help. I liked this part of the story because, while I appreciate what the heroes in tales like this do, I don't think they need to be compensated with a wife. What if they don't get along? Sure, he was heroic, but what do you really know about the guy? Not much.
The Crab and the Monkey: I liked this story because the crab's friends help right the injustice wrought upon her by the monkey. She was nice enough to share with him, but then he goes and takes advantage of her generosity and then nearly beats her to death when she tricks him into giving her some of the good fruit from her own tree. Thankfully, the egg (who makes friends with an egg, by the way?) shatters and pokes him in the eye, the wasp stings him on the nose, and the mortar falls on top of his head, a just reward (at least to me) for the monkey's foul treatment of the crab. The recurring theme of "greed leads to bad consequences" is carried out again in this Japanese fairy tale, but this time in animal form.
The Magic Kettle: This was such a sweet story where good things happen to good people and no one is greedy (and, therefore, needing to be punished). One man's neighbor tells him how to get rich off of the kettle he just bought which turns out to be a shape-shifting tanuki (the cute little creature in the picture below; however, a quite different version of the tanuki is featured in later stories), instead of taking the kettle for himself to get rich. Then, after the man does what his neighbor says and gets rich, the man feels like he should give some kind of compensation to the guy who gave him the means to his riches, so he gives him back the kettle with 100 gold pieces in it. How nice of him! It's refreshing to read such a positive fairy tale.
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| Cute Tanuki from The Magic Kettle The Crimson Fairy Book by Andrew Lang and illustrated by H. J. Ford (1903) |
The Slaying of the Tanuki: Unfortunately, the other tanuki tales are not nearly so positive. As you can see in the picture below, this version of the tanuki isn't quite so cute as the kettle one and he's not a very nice guy either. In this story, he steals food a man leaves out for his hare friend. When the man gets angry and captures the mischievous creature, the tanuki attacks the mans wife, puts her in a pot, changes himself to look like her, and then feeds the wife to the man. Yeah, very dark stuff. The man is obviously distraught at this and his friend, the hare, helps him get back at the tanuki by setting a pile of sticks on his back on fire and applying a stinging oil to the burn. Something I noticed about most of these stories is that they end by basically saying "everyone was happy and everything was good for the rest of their lives until they died." I like these kinds of endings much more than the very dark endings, like the one story where the guy realizes his parents have been dead for 300 years and he basically turns into a mummy and dies. Yikes.
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| Creepy tanuki from The Slaying of the Tanuki The Crimson Fairy Book by Andrew Lang and illustrated by H. J. Ford (1903) |
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