Japanese Fairy Tales by Yei Theodora Ozaki
Jul. 8th, 2016 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroExactly what it says on the tin: Fairytales. From Japan.
This was free via Aldiko, and I put it on my phone because it seemed like a good “read five minutes at a time” sort of book. It’s fascinating reading another culture’s fairy tales and the assumptions they build in. Animals talk, and that’s just as a matter of course. For that matter, there’s just a general assumption that creatures can shapeshift. And when someone needs to go under the sea, they just do—breathing underwater doesn’t seem to be a concern.
And oddly, I feel like most of the protagonists of European fairy tales tend to be young. Many, many of these stories focus around old men. (And many of those men don’t even get names. They’re just “the old man.”)
That said, while this makes for an interesting curiosity, it’s worth what I paid for it. The translation is awkward in a lot of places and very literal and the proofreading isn’t the best. And I won’t be reading any of these to ARR because a) the primary lessons of the stories are often ones I don’t really want him to absorb (even if a lot of that is a function of them being fairy tales rather than being Japanese), and b) they aren’t actually very entertaining stories. The best of the lot rely on the type of conflict he’s not really comfortable with.
I actually tried telling ARR a bastardized version of “The Man Who Made Withered Trees to Blossom” (among other things, the dog didn’t die in my version), and he didn’t like it, mostly because the neighbor was a jerk for no reason and his comeuppance never involves apologizing or making restitution.
Overall: An interesting curiosity, but unless you have a fascination with such things, don’t go out of your way.
This was free via Aldiko, and I put it on my phone because it seemed like a good “read five minutes at a time” sort of book. It’s fascinating reading another culture’s fairy tales and the assumptions they build in. Animals talk, and that’s just as a matter of course. For that matter, there’s just a general assumption that creatures can shapeshift. And when someone needs to go under the sea, they just do—breathing underwater doesn’t seem to be a concern.
And oddly, I feel like most of the protagonists of European fairy tales tend to be young. Many, many of these stories focus around old men. (And many of those men don’t even get names. They’re just “the old man.”)
That said, while this makes for an interesting curiosity, it’s worth what I paid for it. The translation is awkward in a lot of places and very literal and the proofreading isn’t the best. And I won’t be reading any of these to ARR because a) the primary lessons of the stories are often ones I don’t really want him to absorb (even if a lot of that is a function of them being fairy tales rather than being Japanese), and b) they aren’t actually very entertaining stories. The best of the lot rely on the type of conflict he’s not really comfortable with.
I actually tried telling ARR a bastardized version of “The Man Who Made Withered Trees to Blossom” (among other things, the dog didn’t die in my version), and he didn’t like it, mostly because the neighbor was a jerk for no reason and his comeuppance never involves apologizing or making restitution.
Overall: An interesting curiosity, but unless you have a fascination with such things, don’t go out of your way.
