Folk Legends From Tono: Japan's Spirits, Deities, and Phantastic Creatures
Page 17
The only attempt to translate this supplementary section of 299 tales into English, as far as I know, was made by Toda Shizuo (1904–1987) in his 1983 manuscript titled Tono monogatari: Folklore and Tradition in the Tono Districts. The British Folklore Society, which refused to publish his work, considered Toda’s text to be substandard in terms of the accuracy of the translations from Japanese and in the quality of the English renderings. Toda printed a few copies of his translation for his own personal use.
When translating these tales, I had access to Toda’s translation as well as Japanese-language tale annotations published by the now closed Legends of Tono Research Institute, 遠野物語研究所. In 2002, the members of the institute began compiling “Explanatory Notes and Commentary” for the 1935 supplementary stories: 『注釈 遠野物語拾遺』, Chushaku Tono monogatari shui. In 2011, the first volume of the explanatory notes (covering tales 1–101) was completed, and in 2013 the second volume (containing tales 102–299) was published. This material was very helpful in preparing the current translation.
I used the Kadokawa Bunko 2012 (twenty-sixth printing) edition of Tono monogatari as my basic Japanese text for translation. Ishii Masami’s book Yanagita Kunio to Tono monogatari (Miyai Shoten, 2003) provided useful background on how the 1935 collection was put together.
So that the reader can see how the original Japanese sequence of the tales has been changed in the English translation, I have placed two numbers at the end of each tale. The first number is the order of the tale in the English translation. The second number indicates a tale’s location in the sequence of 1–299 tales in the original Japanese text. Japanese names are in the Japanese order, family name first.
Notes
1. A. W. Sadler, “The Spirit-Captives of Japan’s North Country: Nineteenth Century Narratives of the Kamikakushi,” Asian Folklore Studies 46, no. 2 (1987): 217–226.
2. Translated with an introduction by Ann Waswo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
3. Yukio Mishima, “Two Essays by Mishima Yukio on Yanagita Kunio,” trans. J. Thomas Rimer, Delos 1, no. 3 (1988): 120.
About the Translator
Ronald A. Morse is the foremost international authority on the Japanese folklorist Yanagita Kunio. He has a PhD in Japanese history from Princeton University and worked in the US government in Washington, D.C., for over two decades. He was a university professor in Japan and at UCLA before retiring in 2005. In 2012, he was awarded the Tono Cultural Prize. Two of Morse’s most recent open access English e-book publications are a collection of essays by Japanese sociologist Tsurumi Kazuko (2014, http://www.japanime.com/tsurumi) and a collection of essays on folklorist Yanagita Kunio (2012, http://www.japanime.com/yanagita). Morse’s dissertation, Yanagita Kunio and the Folklore Movement: The Search for Japan’s National Character and Distinctiveness, was reissued in February 2015.