Japanese Fairy Tales

Long, long ago in Japan there lived an old man and his wife. The old man was a good, kind-hearted, hard-working old fellow …First published in 1903, Japanese Fairy Tales is a classic compendium of Japanese folklore. From the stirring opening tale of ‘My Lord Bag of Rice’, where a ferocious warrior faces a mythical beast, to moving fables of compassion like ‘The Tongue-Cut Sparrow’, the twenty-two collected stories present a glorious patchwork of Japan’s rich folkloric tradition.Representing the West’s first commercial introduction to the storytelling tradition of Japan, these tales are as brilliantly entertaining – and important – now as they were at the beginning of the last century, and are presented here in a handsome new edition for a new generation.

Yei Theodora Ozaki (1870–1932) was a Japanese translator of short stories and fairy tales. Ozaki was born in London to Baron Saburō Ozaki (1842–1918) and an English woman, Bathia Catherine Morrison (1843–1936), and she spent her youth in Fulham, moving to Toyko in 1887. Yei took up work for a British diplomat, and travelled Europe before returning and taking up a post as a teacher. She began to publish translated short stories from 1900, and her crowning achievement, The Japanese Fairy Book, was published in 1903.