Japanese tales

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32524, 6 February 1971, Page 10

Japanese tales

A Collection of Tales from U/l. By D. E. Mills. Cambridge University Press. 459 pp. (Illustrated). The 197 stories translated from the collection Uji Shui Monogatari, dating from about 1200 AD., is introduced by a formidable apparatus of scholarship. Many readers will skip these 130-odd opening pages, but if they do, they will lose many shrewd comments, not only critical on the provenance of the stories, but also on the life and times portrayed, a feudal Japan with Shinto and Buddhism inextricably entangled, a peasant society with a few great noble families (Fujiwara, Tachibana, Minamoto, etc.) presided over by a sophisticated imperial court. The stories themselves (their scenes set between 800 and 1200 A.D.) are delightful, and some provoke a comparison with Aesop, e.g. “How a sparrow repaid a debt of gratitude.” Some have a heavy Buddhist moral. The bawdy, the supernatural, magic and divination, the practical joke and many gently humorous} anecdotes with

considerable naturalness in portraying human fraility, make up a hotchpotch with the virtue, for the western reader, of complete surprise, especially for those who remember the Jane Austenish tone of the eleventh century novelist, Lady Murasaki. Many of the stories succeed in their own right: the poor samurai’s prayer to the goddess Kannon is answered by a mere straw, but this is exchanged for oranges, the oranges for rolls of cloth, the cloth for a horse, the horse for ricefields. The washer-woman hiding the Crown Prince from his enemies reminds one of Prince Charles, sheltering in his oak tree. Other stories interest us because they illuminate medieval Japan. It was a misfortune, we find, to have to live in the country. The current marriage custom encouraged the bridegroom to spend three nights secretly with his chosen bride: then he stayed on till morning and announced the arrangement as a permanency to his no doubt gratified in-laws.