Monsters, Animals, and other Worlds. A Collection of Short Medieval Japanese Tales

Abstract

This collection of twenty-five medieval short stories is a collaboration between fifteen translators, including the two editors Keller Kimbrough and Shirane Haruo. The stories were written during the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries and published in different types of emaki formats. They are all illustrated short stories with origins in medieval scrolls and manuscripts. In the Edo period these medieval tales were further popularized as woodblock prints and labelled as otogiz oshi (companion small books). One innovative technique in some of these stories was to arrange the texts and images in a way that allowed dialogues to enter the picture frame, similar to speech balloons in contemporary manga (Tsuji 2001, 69). In emaki these printed words inside or around drawings are called gach ushi. Often the speech conveyed in this way was in vernacular Japanese, contrasting with the main text in classical Japanese. Research on Japanese medieval short stories typically draws together an interdisciplinary scholarship on Japanese literature, history of art, religion, cultural studies etc. Likewise, the collaborative work of Monsters, Animals, and other Worlds is the fruit of an international symposium on monsters and the fantastic in early modern Japanese illustrated narratives, held at Columbia University on November 1, 2013. My own interest in these stories stems from my historical anthropological research on children and childhood in late medieval and early modern Japan. For this research, medieval short stories are a fascinating source thanks to their textual and visual representations of children and also because boys and girls were among those who listened to and read these stories. The book contains an introduction, followed by the twenty-five translated stories divided into three categories. The first section runs under the theme ‘Monsters, Warriors and Journeys to Other Worlds’, the second section covers ‘Buddhist Tales’ and the third section is about ‘Interspecies affairs’. It is noteworthy that although grouped in three different sections, most stories in this book share an engagement with Buddhist doctrine and praise for filial piety. Shirane’s introduction explains the largely Buddhist context of medieval Japanese short stories as well as their use during public religious lectures to men, women and children of different social status. The introduction also discusses the meanings of border-crossing in this volume. Indeed, border-crossing, both between species and geographical