Folk Legends from Tono

Rowman & Littlefield 2015

Pb, 170pp, illus, ind, £18.95, ISBN 9781442248212

FORTEAN TIMES BOOKSHOP PRICE £16.95

In modern Japan, traditional folklore is a big thing, not unsurprisingly, given that ancestor worship of Kami, ancestor spirits, is a foundation of its culture. It forms the basis of a lot of Manga; one only need to look at the work of the late, great Shigeru Mizuki, behind such work as Gegegeno Kitaro and Nonnonba, to see its significance.

This collection of folk legends forms the second volume of Tono stories, or monogatari. It was released in Japan in 1935 as a supplement to the 1910 Tales of Tono. The tales in both books were collected by Sasaki Kizen, those presented in the first book being heavily rewritten by eminent folklorist Yanagita Kunio, in what he believed was an acceptable literary style. In the 1935 volume, the style of Sasaki Kizen was kept, giving it more of a true flavour of how these tales might have been told.

Yanagita Kunio is regarded as the founding father of Japanese folklore studies. He was a mentor of Sasaki Kizen, a native of Tono, who spent a lot of time gathering tales in the region. Their Tono Monogatari is one of the most important books in Japanese folklore. Yanagita was attempting to preserve as much traditional culture as possible before it disappeared as a result of the government’s efforts to eradicate traditional culture and old legends in favour of a more nationalistic cult and industrialisation. He also believed that much traditional Japanese lore focused on elites, ignoring the everyday life of ordinary people.

Sasaki Kizen’s significance as a folklorist has only recently been recognised. A respiratory illness forced him to leave Tokyo and return to Tono, where he began collecting local folk tales. He died in 1933 at the relatively young age of 47, just before the second collection of Tono Legends came out, one he had been asked to put together. Nowadays, Sasaki is regarded as Japan’s answer to the Grimms.

The experience of ordinary people certainly is at the heart of the Tono stories. Part of the appeal of the collection to modern Japanese is that it offers a window on how their immediate ancestors might have lived. It has been a major draw for visitors to Tono today, and the modern city is known a ‘A City of Folklore’, in part because of the Tono Monogatari. The collection is part of Japanese popular culture; Shigeru Mizuki produced his own version of it in 2010.

This is the first time the book has been translated into English. Ronald A Morse translated The Legends of Tono into English, to mark the 100th anniversary of it first being published. In translating the second volume, Morse had quite a task. In the original Japanese, the second book is a random hodge-podge of tales, not categorised in any particular theme or order. There are 299 stories, and in preparing the text for English translation, Morse decided to organise them accordingly to his own “philosophy about the universality of human biology and evolutionary psychology’.

He believes that as time passed, humans became ‘hardwired’ to their physical environment by creating social, psychological and religious schemas. Morse has arranged the 299 tales according to this, categorising them within an outward expanding set of ‘concentric circles’, from the individual to other social spheres. And he has done an excellent job; though the original Japanese collection has been likened by novelist Mishima Yukio to a well-ordered lumber house, it is probable that any English translation following the same arrangement might be confusing. Morse has also marked in his translation the order in which each tale is in the original text.

The translation captures the tone of how Japanese tales are told beautifully, following in the tradition of Lafcadio Hearn. The tales aren’t changed to suit an accepted Western narrative, which would detract from them. They are highly evocative, bringing to mind a vivid picture of the people, villages and

“The supernatural is there as a fact of life, with a little bellyaching for authenticity”

otherworldly beings, the Yokai, featured in the tales. There is a certain closeness to the tales, perhaps in part due to the fact that some were told to Sasaki Kizen by the people who directly experienced the events. They are memorates of ordinary people, as opposed to the grand legends of Samurai warriors, lords and shoguns.

One striking aspect is the way in which the everyday and supernatural realms mix – there is no delineation of the type present in, for example, English folk stories of the same era, when much is made of the events about to be described as a true and accurate account.

In the Tono legends, as in much of Japanese society, the supernatural is there as a fact of life, with a little bellyaching for authenticity.

Here, we see bereaved family members fend off foxes masquerading as the ghost or Yurei of their recently deceased relatives. A family’s maidservant becoming a Yokai serpent and abandoning her baby is just one of those things that happen. Mountain entities, or Tengu, offer to help families with chores such as gathering food or planting crops, in exchange for rice cakes or sake. Deities at local shrines step in to help people sort out problems, whilst their statues enjoy being played with by children.

Folk Legends of Tono is enjoyable, and should be in the collection of any serious folklore aficionado.