The Legends of Tono

Much of what we know of Japanese folklore might have been lost forever if it were not for two authors, Lafcadio Hearn and Kunio Yanagita. Both were avid collectors of the mysterious tales of weird and imaginative creatures that were passed down as oral folklore but never written down. Both did their work at the start of the Meiji era, a time when, in the name of modernization, the government and scholars of Japan were actively attempting to wipe out the beliefs and superstitions of previous eras which were thought to be embarrassing to a country entering the modern age."The Legends of Tono" (Japanese title "Tono Monogatari") is the most famous of Yanagita's works, collecting the narratives of the small town of Tono in Iwate prefecture, as told to him by local resident and storyteller Kizen Sasaki. The stories collected in "The Legends of Tono" include some of Japan's most famous monsters like the kappa and the child-ghosts zashiki-warashi. Along with Hearn's  Kwaidan: Stories And Studies Of Strange Things  and Ueda Akinari's  Tales of Moonlight and Rain , "The Legends of Tono" is one of the most classic and important books on Japanese folklore.A surprisingly small book for one that carries so much weight, there are exactly one hundred and nineteen legends spread out over fifty-eight pages. Many of these legends are only a sentence in length, and often there are three to four different legends on a page. Some of them are a bit longer, maybe a paragraph or two, and typical of Japanese folklore they do not tell a complete story but rather just describe an odd circumstance or the history behind some strange stone or tree local to a certain village. Many explain customs of the time in Tono village, and the movements of household gods and festivals. Some are sexual cautionary tales, and other frights designed to keep people in their proper place for fear of punishment. Yanagita's style was to record the legends in a straight-forward manner without decoration and little elaboration.However, packed inside Yanagita's short sentences is an ocean of depth, one that is almost impossible to know just through a quick reading. Indeed, in Japanese there are annotated versions of "The Legends of Tono" that go on for four hundred pages or more digging into each of Yanagita's terse sentences as if mining for gold. His simple and direct writing style would become a massive influence on author Mishima Yukio (The Sailor who fell from grace with the sea) who considered "The Legends of Tono" to be the finest-written work of Japanese literature.There was more to "The Legends of Tono" than simple folklore gathering and writing however. This was a book with a political agenda. Yanagita was protesting against official histories at the time, which concentrated only on the rich and powerful and ignored the lives and hopes of the millions of poor peasants who, in the words of someone with similar inclinations, "did most of the living and dying" in Japan. Yanagita did not want to see the stories of these people lost to the tides of time, and so he gathered them up and wrote them down for future generations.This "100th Anniversary Edition" celebrates the original 1910 publication of "The Legends of Tono." It reprints the 1975 translation prepared by Yanagita-scholar Ronald A. Morse. Morse includes a preface to the 100th Anniversary Edition, the original forward to the 1975 edition written by Richard M. Dorson who had actually worked and studied with Yanagita, and a new introduction discussing the relevance of Yanagita's work today. These three introductions add a bit of bulk to the publication, and some background on Yanagita and his relevance.Morse also includes a "Guide to English-Language Writings on Kunio Yanagita and "The Legends of Tono"" in the back of the book for those interested in pursuing further study on the man and his works.

If you are trying to read as many Japanese folktales as you can then you should check this out because it is an important collection. That being said it is a very short collection and the quality of the photos reproduced in the book are quite poor so despite the hardcover looking nice on your shelf the contents inside don't warrant the price. The stories are interesting and there seems to be no more affordable translation though so I still give it four stars. Hopefully a more affordable e-book or paperback will come out soon.

Great traditional folklore for all myth lovers.

Excellent stories on Japanese ledgers.

Perfect, thanks

This is one of the earliest books by the great folklorist Yanagita Kunio, and consists of 119 short pieces of folklore from the Tono district of Iwate prefecture, northern Japan. Anyone hoping for quaint, amusing yarns will be disappointed. The atmosphere is deeply alien and the cultural attitudes revealed are often cruel, even shocking. Consider this extract from legend No. 100 for example:"A certain fisherman at Funakoshi was on his way back from Kirikiri with his companions one day. Late at night, as they were passing by the area of the Forty-Eight Hills, they came across a woman alone by a stream. The fisherman looked and realized that it was his wife. He figured that there was no reason for her coming to this area alone in the middle of the night and decided that it had to be a ghost creature of some kind. At once, he took out the knife that he used to clean fish and stabbed her from behind. She gave out a sorrowful cry and died."Later, it turns out that the dead woman does indeed transform back into a fox, while the fisherman's wife is alive and well. Still, the fisherman's unhesitating decision to stab his own wife in the back on the assumption that she was a disguised demon is chilling, and makes one wonder what on earth really happened that night.Or consider this extract from legend No. 55:"Many kappa (mischievous water spirits) live in rivers. There are large numbers of kappa in the Saru-ga-ishi River. In a house by the river in Matsuzaki village, women have become pregnant with a kappa's children for two generations. When the kappa-children are born, they are hacked into pieces, put into small wine casks, and buried in the ground. They are grotesque."This speaks to a fearful and brutal response to the birth of deformed children. The following legend, No. 56, also relates to kappa:"A child looking something like a kappa was born into a certain family in Kamigo village. There was no definite proof that it was a kappa's child, but it had bright red skin and a large mouth. It was indeed a disgusting child. Loathing the child and wanting to get rid of it, someone took it to a fork in the road and sat it down. After having walked away only a short distance, he realized that he could make money by showing it. He went back, but it was already hiding and nowhere to be seen."The brutality of the decision to abandon the deformed child is matched only by the cynicism of the man's sudden realization that he might be able to make money from it by showing it at a freak show.Of course it is pointless to judge the people of a rural community over 100 years ago by contemporary moral standards, but it is a sharp reminder of the wisdom of L.P. Hartley's remark that "the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."Perhaps the most interesting conundrum raised by the Legends of Tono is how on earth Yanagita was able to take material like this and forge it into his project of a national folklore that could underpin Japanese nationalistic pride. The legends do not read like that at all: rather, they make very discomforting reading.This is a fascinating cultural-historical document, brilliantly translated by Ron Morse, who has done us a great service by bringing this thought-provoking collection of vignettes to the English-reading public. Well worth five stars.

This is new and expanded version of this Japanese classic and much needed. Very readable and a great addition to the literature.As Tono City in Japan heads into its celebrations for 2010, The Legends of Tono should be a best seller. The legends in the book are now being serialized as a new manga by the famous artist Mizuki Shigeru and the successful movie animation "Summer Days with the Kappa Coo" is largely set in Tono.I highly recommend.

Un'ottima raccolta delle più rappresentative leggende del folklore giapponese. E' necessario però avere una buona conoscenza della lingua inglese.

This is one of the earliest books by the great folklorist Yanagita Kunio, and consists of 119 short pieces of folklore from the Tono district of Iwate prefecture, northern Japan. Anyone hoping for quaint, amusing yarns will be disappointed. The atmosphere is deeply alien and the cultural attitudes revealed are often cruel, even shocking. Consider this extract from legend No. 100 for example:"A certain fisherman at Funakoshi was on his way back from Kirikiri with his companions one day. Late at night, as they were passing by the area of the Forty-Eight Hills, they came across a woman alone by a stream. The fisherman looked and realized that it was his wife. He figured that there was no reason for her coming to this area alone in the middle of the night and decided that it had to be a ghost creature of some kind. At once, he took out the knife that he used to clean fish and stabbed her from behind. She gave out a sorrowful cry and died."Later, it turns out that the dead woman does indeed transform back into a fox, while the fisherman's wife is alive and well. Still, the fisherman's unhesitating decision to stab his own wife in the back on the assumption that she was a disguised demon is chilling, and makes one wonder what on earth really happened that night.Or consider this extract from legend No. 55:"Many kappa (mischievous water spirits) live in rivers. There are large numbers of kappa in the Saru-ga-ishi River. In a house by the river in Matsuzaki village, women have become pregnant with a kappa's children for two generations. When the kappa-children are born, they are hacked into pieces, put into small wine casks, and buried in the ground. They are grotesque."This speaks to a fearful and brutal response to the birth of deformed children. The following legend, No. 56, also relates to kappa:"A child looking something like a kappa was born into a certain family in Kamigo village. There was no definite proof that it was a kappa's child, but it had bright red skin and a large mouth. It was indeed a disgusting child. Loathing the child and wanting to get rid of it, someone took it to a fork in the road and sat it down. After having walked away only a short distance, he realized that he could make money by showing it. He went back, but it was already hiding and nowhere to be seen."The brutality of the decision to abandon the deformed child is matched only by the cynicism of the man's sudden realization that he might be able to make money from it by showing it at a freak show.Of course it is pointless to judge the people of a rural community over 100 years ago by contemporary moral standards, but it is a sharp reminder of the wisdom of L.P. Hartley's remark that "the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."Perhaps the most interesting conundrum raised by the Legends of Tono is how on earth Yanagita was able to take material like this and forge it into his project of a national folklore that could underpin Japanese nationalistic pride. The legends do not read like that at all: rather, they make very discomforting reading.This is a fascinating cultural-historical document, brilliantly translated by Ron Morse, who has done us a great service by bringing this thought-provoking collection of vignettes to the English-reading public. Well worth five stars.