COLLECTION
Explore the stories, beliefs, and extraordinary beings of this tradition.
A bamboo cutter finds a tiny girl in a glowing stalk, five noblemen fail at impossible quests, and the people of the moon take her home, leaving the emperor an elixir he has burned on Mount Fuji. It is Japan's oldest tale in prose, and it was not a folk tale: a learned man wrote it, and his name is lost.
Read story 11 min readA courtier rode out with a red banner to fetch the thunder for his emperor, and caught it twice. Japan's oldest books are full of thunder and wind gods, but the pair with the ring of drums and the bag of wind came later, with Buddhist art from China.
Read story 10 min readA fisherman catches a turtle that becomes a woman, lives three years in her land beyond the sea, and comes home to find three hundred years gone. Japan has told the story since the 8th century, but the children on the beach, the ride on the turtle's back and even the name Tarō came much later.
Read story 10 min readAn old woman pulls a giant peach from the river, and the boy named after it sails to the island of the oni with a dog, a monkey and a pheasant. In the oldest picture books, though, he does not come out of the peach: the old couple eat it, grow young again and have a son.
Read story 10 min readHorned, wrapped in tiger skin and armed with an iron club, the oni is the ogre Japan drives out with beans every year. Yet the oldest oni has one eye and no description, the word may once have meant something hidden, and in some villages the oni at the door is a god.
Read story 12 min readA woman in white breathes death on an old woodcutter and spares the young one, on one condition. Japan's most famous snow-woman story was first printed in English, by Lafcadio Hearn in 1904; the snow woman herself is much older, and much stranger.
Read story 10 min readA creature the size of a child, with a hollow of water on its head, waits in the river for horses and swimmers, yet a polite bow can drain its strength. Japan's best-known water spirit has dozens of local names, and an encyclopedia of 1712 draws it as a hairy, upright figure like an ape, not a turtle.
Read story 13 min readA man of Mino married a woman who turned out to be a fox, and asked her to keep coming to sleep with him: that, says a book of about 822, is why the fox is called kitsune. Over the next thousand years the Japanese fox became a trickster, a wife, a messenger of the god Inari and, for some families, a stigma that lasted into modern times.
Read story 11 min readIn 637 a monk told the Japanese court that a roaring star was no meteor but a tengu, a "heavenly dog". Over the next thousand years the tengu became a kite that fooled the pious, the fallen soul of a proud monk, a mountain spirit that carried children away, and at last the red-faced, long-nosed figure still honoured on Kurama and Takao.
Read story 13 min readIzanagi followed his dead wife into Yomi, the land of the dead, broke the one thing she asked of him and saw what she had become. He fled with her army behind him and sealed the pass with a boulder, and the words they spoke across it set how many people die and are born each day.
Read story 10 min readThrown out of heaven, Susanoo comes down by a river in Izumo, makes a serpent with eight heads drunk and cuts it to pieces. In its tail is the sword that became one of Japan's imperial regalia. Izumo's own record of its gods never mentions the serpent.
Read story 9 min readThe sun goddess shut herself in a cave and the world went dark, until the gods hung a mirror on a tree and a goddess danced on an upturned tub so wildly that heaven shook with laughter. Japan's two oldest books do not agree on why she hid, or on what brought her out.
Read story 9 min readJapan's oldest book does not begin with a king but with brine: two gods stir the sea with a jewelled spear, circle a pillar, get it wrong once, and give birth to the islands.
Read story 5 min read
