Once, it was such good weather that the river dried up. Thus, the shark could not swim back to the ocean. The shark requested rainfall from heaven so that the level of the river water would rise and it could swim home. Because of this, whenever there is a festival, it is said that rain will fall.
On festival days, it is the rule that villagers will neither bathe in nor take water from the river. Once someone broke this taboo and bathed in the river. Until then, the weather had been clear for several days, but all of a sudden there was a heavy downpour. The rice fields and the homes of many people were flooded. It is said that the house of the person who broke the taboo was washed away and all the members of his family drowned. (297-33)
On the seventh of July, people are encouraged to eat thick udon-style noodles made from wheat flour. The tradition for this is said to come from the pampas grass cakes in which a husband ate his dead wife’s flesh. At that time, the husband put her sinews off to the side and ate them on July 7 as if they were current-day udon-style noodles. This is one theory about the origin of eating thick noodles on the seventh day of the seventh month. (298-299)
Obon consists of a series of Buddhist ceremonies in mid-August when relatives welcome the souls of the dead back home. The thirteenth evening of Obon is the first time for recently departed spirits (arabotoke) to come back. In a house with an arabotoke, the family members take a bottle-shaped gourd to the person’s grave site and leave it there. This is because the newly departed must watch over the grave and can’t return to the house. The gourd is left to show that they welcome the spirit back. In some areas, they use the flower of a bottle gourd plant instead. (299-270)
Appendix A
A Brief Biography of Japan’s Grimm
Sasaki Kizen
After the one hundredth anniversary celebrations for the publication of Yanagita Kunio’s Tono monogatari in 2010, local leaders in Tono City started to turn their attention to a broader spectrum of local literary talent, which included the poet and fairy-tale writer Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933), comic playwright and novelist Inoue Hisashi (1934–2010), and of course Tono’s “favorite son,” Sasaki (Kyoseki) Kizen (1886–1933), a key figure in the collection and documentation of Tono’s narrative traditions.
While Sasaki’s folklore accomplishments have long been overshadowed by those of his mentor and sometime collaborator Yanagita Kunio, recently there has been a reevaluation of Sasaki’s own accomplishments, particularly as a novelist and writer before he began his association with Yanagita Kunio in 1908.1
There are many theories about why Sasaki turned away from his early literary ambitions after 1910 to become a folk narrative collector and editor, but high on the list of reasons was a respiratory problem that required him to return to Tono. Also, without being directly involved in the Tokyo literary scene, it was difficult to sustain a career as a writer. Then there were the doubts that some of his associates had about Sasaki’s actual potential as a novelist. His early writings were brief and closer to poetry than novels. And then there was his influential mentor Yanagita, who wanted him to stick with folktale collecting.
To be sure, folk society was what Sasaki knew best. He grew up in a village in Tono surrounded by talented storytellers and early on became an avid collector of folk stories on his own. Most of his later publications were in the area of narrative folk literature, though he wrote folklore-related articles and some fiction. It was because of his rich knowledge of folktales that around 1922, Kindaichi Kyosuke (1882–1971), the famous linguistics expert from nearby Morioka City, called Sasaki “Japan’s Grimm” in reference to his being the Japanese equivalent of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, the famous German brothers who collected the tales known as Kinder-und Hausmärchen (1812). Building on this connection, the city of Steinau, where the brothers Grimm spent part of their childhood, and Tono City have recently established a comparative research relationship.
Sasaki was born on October 5, 1886, in the small rural farming community of Tsuchibuchi in the Tono City area of Iwate Prefecture in northern Japan. His father died before his birth, and through a complicated series of family negotiations he was adopted into his maternal grandfather’s family, giving him, he later said, the feeling of being an orphan. He went to school in Tono City and then nearby Morioka. At age sixteen, he entered Iwate medical school, took an interest in Christianity, and returned home after two years. His grandfather had high hopes for him to become a doctor or a politician.
At age twenty, Sasaki went off to Tokyo to study and began experimenting with writing. He made friends, and his roommate was the young but successful writer Mizuno Yoshu (1883–1947). Mizuno brought attention to Sasaki’s folktale knowledge by writing a novella about him titled The Person from the North Country (Kitaguni no hito). Mizuno’s fictional portrait of Sasaki suggests a brooding and restless spirit. In 1907, Sasaki affiliated with Waseda University.
In November 1908, Yanagita Kunio, a recently published author and eleven years Sasaki’s senior, was introduced to Sasaki by Mizuno. Sasaki shared his Tono stories with Yanagita Kunio over the course of several nights in February 1909. Yanagita then went to Tono City in August 1909 to see the area for himself. Yanagita put all of these materials together in a short book, The Legends of Tono (Tono monogatari, 1910), which over time became a folklore and literary classic.
Sasaki fell seriously ill in 1911 with respiratory problems and eventually returned to Tono. Between 1911 and 1927, he studied folklore, did some writing, and held a series of village administrative positions. He was head of the Tsuchibuchi village administrative office from 1925 to 1929.
Sasaki continued to have health problems throughout the 1920s but continued his fieldwork and traveled extensively with Yanagita Kunio and other folklore scholars. He spent the last four years of his life (1929–1933) in Sendai City, a major regional culture center not too far from Tono. Sendai offered Sasaki media outlets for his writing and speaking, and cultural facilities for his research.
It was around this time that, as part of a planned celebration of Yanagita Kunio’s sixtieth birthday (in 1935), Yanagita’s folklore associates decided to issue an “expanded edition” of the 1910 Tono monogatari by adding a separate (or sequel) supplementary collection of stories more broadly representing the Tono region. Sasaki was tasked with gathering the tales to be included in the supplementary (1935) edition. He sent tales for the new collection to Yanagita Kunio in several installments around 1927.
During his lifetime, Sasaki never received full recognition for his contributions to the Tono monogatari texts and folklore studies more generally. He died in 1933 at age forty-eight, and his remains are interred in a cemetery located near his birthplace in Tono. Today, a memorial hall to Sasaki is located inside the sightseeing spot Denshoen in Tono City. Sasaki’s collected works were published in four volumes between 1987 and 2003. His personal library, letters, and publications are housed in the Tono City Library.2
Notes
1. For discussions about Sasaki’s early career, see the journal Tonogaku (Studies of Tono) published by the Tono Cultural Center. Sasaki published a number of folktale and folklore collections: Esashi-gun mukashibanashi (Tales of Esashi County, 1922); Shiwa-gun mukashibanashi (Folktales of Shiwa County, 1926); Too ibun (Strange Tales of Too, 1926), a collection of Sasaki’s essays; Roo yatan (Evening Talks with an Old Woman, 1927), 103 tales told by Sasaki’s neighbor, Haneishi Tanie (1859–1927); Kikimimi soshi (Listen Closely Storybook, 1931); Nomin ritan (Farmer Talks, 1934), Sasaki’s writings during his final years; and Kamihei-gun mukashibanashi (Folktales of Kamihei County, 1943).
2. See Christopher Robins, “Narrating Tono: Yanagita Kunio, Sasaki Kizen & Inoue Hisashi,” in Yanagita Kunio and Japanese Folklore Studies in the 21st Century, ed. Ronald A. Morse, 63–79 (Kawaguchi: Japanime, 2012), http://www.japanime.com/yanagita. In 2004 the Tono City Library published a comprehensive 117-page illustrated overview of Sasaki’s life titled N
ihon no Gurimu: Sasaki Kizen (Japan’s Grimm: Sasaki Kizen).
Appendix B
Background to the Book
Ronald A. Morse
In 1910, Yanagita Kunio, who later went on to establish folklore studies in Japan, printed 350 copies of his Tono monogatari (Tales of Tono) and presented them mainly to friends and family. At the time, the work drew little attention, despite some favorable reviews by well-known writers. In the years that followed, there were several plans to either reprint the original 1910 collection as it was, rewrite the original collection in an easier-to-read modern Japanese language style, or supplement the original work with an expanded selection of tales more broadly representing the Tono region. For a variety of reasons, none of these plans were implemented for a quarter of a century.
The 299 tales in Folk Legends from Tono: Japan’s Spirits, Deities, and Phantastic Creatures were first published in Japanese in 1935 as a supplement to the original 1910 Tono monogatari. This supplementary collection of tales is referred to in Japanese as 『遠野物語拾遺』 (Tono monogatari shui). It is a minor technical issue, but I have translated the Japanese title of the supplementary collection as Folk Legends from Tono: Japan’s Spirits, Deities, and Phantastic Creatures. The Japanese book title, Tono monogatari, is usually translated as “Tales of Tono,” but I have decided to use the term “legends” instead of “tales” because this work is a collective body of village folklife told from a single perspective. Also, legends generally contain much more localized content.
Tono monogatari Expanded
In 1935, as part of a planned celebration of Yanagita Kunio’s sixtieth birthday, Yanagita’s folklore associates decided to publish what they termed an “expanded edition,” 『遠野物語 増補版』, of the original 1910 Tono monogatari. By “expanded,” they meant including a sequel or supplementary collection of stories as a separate section. This 1935 expanded edition was also intended to honor the story collector Sasaki Kizen (1886–1933), who had suddenly died two years earlier. Sasaki Kizen was Yanagita’s folktale informant for the tales that were included in both the original 1910 Tono monogatari and the 1935 expanded edition. Yanagita Kunio’s literary skills shaped the style and format of the 1910 edition, but it was Sasaki Kizen’s talent as a storyteller that dominated the 1935 collection of tales.
Reissuing an expanded collection of legends was a good idea at the time (1935), but in the end it led to an awkwardly constructed Japanese volume with the two separate and independent sections under one title (Tono monogatari)—the original 119 legends (1910) followed by a supplemental (1935) section of 299 legends.
Sasaki Kizen was tasked with compiling the tales for the 1935 supplementary section. He sent the tales he collected to Yanagita Kunio in several installments around 1927. Most of these tales were taken from two tale collections that Sasaki was working on at the time: Roo yatan (Evening Talks with an Old Woman, 1927), containing 103 of 170 tales told by Sasaki’s neighbor, Haneishi Tanie (1859–1927), and Kikimimi soshi (Listen Closely Storybook, 1931).
Sasaki died in 1933 before the 1935 collection of Tono tales could be fully compiled and edited. The tales that Sasaki sent to be used for the collection were partially edited by Yanagita Kunio, but most of the editing was supposedly done by Suzuki Tozo (1911–1992), a graduate of Kokugakuin University. All editing of the tales appears to have been quite minimal.
Over the years, a number of writers have suggested that the organization of the tales in Tono monogatari could be improved upon, perhaps making the work more interesting. A. W. Sadler wrote in 1987 that Tono monogatari (referring to both the 1910 and the 1935 editions) was a “classic of folklore, but it has none of the usual trappings of a volume of folktales. There is no attempt to classify. There are no headings and no categories. The book is a ramble and a hodge-podge. You will find fairy tales and legends and even an occasional myth in it.” He went on, “Yanagita, or one of his readers, might have fashioned the Tono Tales into a novel, something along the lines of Winesburg, Ohio or The House of the Seven Gables; but they did not. The material remains in its raw form, unused. Yanagita’s book anticipates a great literary work that was never put to paper.”1 The closest Japanese book in English to what Sadler probably had in mind is Nagatsuka Takashi’s novel, The Soil: A Portrait of Rural Life in Japan (1910).2
The famous Japanese novelist Mishima Yukio (1925–1970), writing in 1970, had similar thoughts about Tono monogatari: “The author makes no comments of any kind concerning the material he has collected. Tono can be said to serve as an accumulation of materials for a study of folklore, a kind of storage room for lumber. Yet the cutting of that lumber, arranging it, piling it up, has been accomplished by the hand of a master woodsman. How remarkable that such data can at the same time give rise to literature!”3
A Reenvisioned English Translation
Once the basic text for the 1935 supplementary collection of 299 stories was translated into English, I (the translator) had to make a choice to either accept the 1935 text as it was or try and improve on it by reenvisioning the order of the tales. Other writers had already faced this challenge. The talented Japanese cartoonist Mizuki Shigeru (b. 1922) totally reconfigured the 1910 text when he published his own manga rendering of Tono monogatari in 2010. To create a successful manga, Mizuki ignored Yanagita’s famous preface to the 1910 Japanese text, left out or modified forty-three legends, and put his own cartoon image into text around 140 times.
In 2013, Japanese mystery writer Kyogoku Natsuhiko (b. 1963), writing for Japanese readers, took on the task of “remixing” (as he called it) the 119 tales in the original (1910) Tono monogatari (The Legends of Tono). He changed the order of the tales to create his own story line and make the text easier to read.
In June 2014, Kyogoku published a recomposed (or “retold” as he expressed it) Japanese text for the 299-tale supplemental (1935) Tono monogatari shui, 『遠野物語拾遺』. The reworking of this material was based on Kyogoku’s own literary sensibility (kansei).
In August 2014, Kyogoku and I met in Tokyo to compare notes on how we approached our respective translations (his into modern Japanese and mine into English). We agreed that there was considerable room for improving the presentation of both the 1910 and the 1935 tale collections, but our approaches for doing this were quite different.
Kyogoku’s resequencing of the 1935 collection of 299 tales was based on his sense that Yanagita Kunio saw the early years of Japan’s Meiji era (1868–1912) modernization as enlightening and positive. But by 1935, Yanagita had become disillusioned with the direction that Japan’s modernization had taken. Kyogoku saw Yanagita’s shift in mood from the dark premodern times (before 1868) into the hope of Meiji enlightenment (1868–1912) and then back into a darker phase (around 1935) as coinciding with the monthly phases of the moon—from a dark new moon to a mid-month bright full moon and then to the darker crescent moon at the end of the month. Using the imagery of these monthly phases of the moon to reorder the complex array of tales in the 1935 collection provided Kyogoku the literary “story line” that he was searching for to resequence the order of the tales in this collection.
I decided to design my own reenvisioning approach for the 1935 collection of tales. I had not done this with my earlier translation of the 1910 collection of Tono monogatari because I felt that Yanagita Kunio was a skilled literary craftsman and had a clear sense of purpose and tale sequencing when he wrote Tono monogatari in 1910. This was not the case with the 1935 collection of tales, which was randomly collected and poorly edited.
My approach to reenvisioning the order of the 1935 collection of tales derives from my philosophy about the universality of human biology and evolutionary psychology. My assumption is that for hundreds of thousands of years, human beings as a species have become biologically hardwired with common mental and emotional capacities. Since the agricultural revolution nine thousand years ago, humans have related to their �
��physical” environment by creating “imagined” social, cultural, and religious universes around them. I believe that this settled peasant economy that humans have survived in is vividly reflected in their folk narrative tales.
Following this logic, I have arranged the 299 tales collected here into a textually constructed community with ever-expanding concentric circles, starting with the biological individual at the center and then moving outward to include broader and broader domains of social and cultural engagement—a linkage to death, souls, and the unknown; extended family and kinship ties; attempting to control the unknown through divination; encounters between settled farmers and quasi-human mountain people; mutual survival with the animal kingdom; intrusive political structures; and finally annual festive celebrations of life. These points are briefly elaborated on at the beginning of the eight chapters of tales.
Of course this reenvisioning had to be done while maintaining the integrity of each of the original 299 tales. I had to remain true to the selection of legends that Sasaki provided. Before starting the process of reenvisioning, I translated the 299 tales in their original order. That translation then served as the foundation for the current reenvisioned text.
I also had to make the material as readable and meaningful as possible for an English-speaking reader. Explanatory data, where appropriate, were folded into the text of the tales. Other materials—maps, illustrations, and a biographical sketch of the local story collector, Sasaki Kizen—were added to enhance the reader’s appreciation of the tales.
Yanagita’s 1910 Tono monogatari has been translated into English, Chinese, Korean, and Spanish. French, German, and Italian translations are in the works. In August 2014, a Chinese translation of the 1935 collection of tales was published.
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