Japanese Fairy World Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan - William Elliot Griffis

JAPANESE FAIRY WORLD Stories from the Wonderlore of Japan by William Elliot Griffiths Preface The thirty-four stories included within this volume do not illustrate the bloody, revengeful or licentious elements with which Japanese popular and juvenile literature is saturated.

These have been carefully avoided.

It is also rather with a view to the artistic than to the literary products of the imagination of Japan that the selection has been made.

From my first acquaintance twelve years ago with Japanese youth, I became an eager listener to their folklore and fireside stories.

when, later, during a residence of nearly four years among the people, my eyes were opened to behold the wondrous fertility of invention, the wealth of literary, historic and classical allusion, of pun, myth and riddle, of heroic wonder and legendary lore in Japanese art.

I at once set myself to find the source of the ideas expressed in bronze and porcelain, on lacquered cabinets, fans, and even crepe paper napkins and tidies.

Sometimes I discovered the originals of the artists' fancy in books, sometimes only in the mouths of the people and professional storytellers.

Some of these stories I first read on the tattooed limbs and bodies of the native footrunners.

others i first saw in the flower tableaux at the street floral shows of tokyo within this book the reader will find translations condensations of whole books of interminable romances and a few sketches by the author embodying japanese ideas beliefs and superstitions i have taken no more liberty i think with the native originals than a modern story-teller of tokyo would himself take were he talking in an american parlour instead of at his bamboo-curtained stand in nyanagi cho willow street in the mikado's capital some of the stories have appeared in english before but most of them are printed for the first time A few reappear from the Independent and other periodicals.

The illustrations and cover stamp, though engraved in New York by Mr. Henry W.

Troy, were, with one exception, drawn especially for this work by my artist friend Ozawa Nankoku of Tokyo.

The picture of Yorimasa, the archer, was made for me by one of my students in Tokyo.

Hoping that these harmless stories that have tickled the imagination of Japanese children during untold generations may amuse the big and little folk of America, the writer invites his readers, in the language of the native host, as he points to the chopsticks and spread table, O Agari Nasai.

William Elliot Griffiths Synecdoche, New York, September 28, 1880. the meeting of the star-lovers.