Showing posts with label 'Oriental'. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 'Oriental'. Show all posts

Monday, March 30, 2020

Review of Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese Tales (Oddly Modern Fairy Tales series)

(Review written by Leigh Smith)




“I have pledged me to the worship of the Odd . . . the Strange . . . the Monstrous… ”
~Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn


“Strange.”

If I had a digital file of Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese tales, I'd be curious to run a search for how many times this word appears amid his 28 tales. This before-his-time multiculturist’s dark fairy tale work foreshadowed an entire body of unsettling art. 

He anticipated the so-called automatic writing of practitioners such as André Breton, opened receptive minds to Cubism and Surrealism movements of the 1920s and primed the public imagination for the fantastical tales of  H.P. Lovecraft. Lafcadio Hearn successfully navigated multiple cultures, transforming himself from Other to revered father figure/folklorist/historian. In short, he became the hero of his own fairy tale life.


As a fan of the macabre and fantastical, I was drawn to this book as a soul to the quintessentially Japanese cherry blossom (sakura)*. The collection's obsession with strangeness is also why I think it’s accessible to our own generation of culturally fluid, proudly freak flag-flying readers. 




Lafcadio Hearn portrait
Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, aka Koizumi Yakumo. 1889
Photo by Frederick Gutekunst / Public domain
Japanese readers in 1900 may have been steeped in the Buddhist and Shinto teachings about life’s vagaries, but in 2020, we have our ‘disappearing’ social media to remind us of our impermanence (Snapchat, TikTok, etc.).

Plus, modern readers will appreciate the bite-sized nature of Hearn’s stories. The tales are just that: short “tail ends” of Japanese legends and folklore, which can be quickly digested and enjoyed. Even the opener, which is the longest story in this anthology-of-sorts—“The Dream of a Summer Day” and its Pandora-like box—is only 17 pages. Most of the stories clock in at only a handful of pages. As a whole, they transcend their time, but for a couple zeitgeist themes or tropes that I'll mention later.



Hearn's “Exotic” Tales

These stories, selected by editor Andrei Codrescu, originally introduced the Western mind to Japanese culture, as seen through Shinto and Buddhist lenses. The cast of colorful characters and tropes readers encounter include:


  • A man who saddles and rides his corpse-wife by clinging to her hair.
  • An enchanting screen maiden (an artist's depiction of a woman on a screen) who becomes real.
  • A shark-person (Samébito) who weeps blood that turns to jewels upon the ground.
  • A samurai-beloved young woman named Aoyagi who experiences a metamorphic twist of fate.
  •  A priest who is transformed into a Golden Carp.
  • An unwitting entertainer for the dead, in the oft-cited ghost story, “The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hōichi”.**

If one thing prevails in this collection, it is this: all is not what it seems, for everything is changing. Constantly. And because everything is in a state of flux, all does not necessarily end well. So, dear reader, do not expect the happily-ever-afters of heavily modernized and Westernized fairy tales. Hearn had his finger on the pulse of the unsettling. Let's briefly explore why that might be.



Lafcadio Hearn: Other from Another Mother

Hearn and Koizumi Setsu.
Unknown photographer in Japan pre-1904 / Public domain
It is not a surprise that Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (1850 – 1904) wrote from a position of Other, considering how he became entangled with his parents' inner demons as a child. He bounced from his mother’s homeland of Greece to his father’s home in Ireland. Both parents eventually abandoned him. 

At age 7, he became a permanent ward of his aunt. By the time he was 19, he was virtually penniless but on his way to America. After spending some time in Cincinnati, Ohio, and a decade in New Orleans, he finally settled in Japan for the last 14 years of his life. He married a Japanese woman and started a family.


“[Hearn] never returned to the womb of his mother's Lefkada [Greece] but found himself at home in a patriarchal world where he was a Father, unlike his own genitor.” 
-Andrei Codrescu, Editor of Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn



It’s impossible not to view these stories through a modern lens. And that lens uncovers glaring threads of patriarchy and age-ism. And while Hearn’s position as an esteemed member of society was hard won, his privilege is reflected in his many elitist characters.  I don't doubt that Hearn (called Mr. Koizumi while he wrote these stories) was a product of his time. But it’s still problematic when the women who appear in these tales exist along a binary. If they’re human, they’re generally preternaturally beautiful, young, graceful, and self-sacrificing—like any “good” Japanese wife of the Hearn’s time. Conversely, they can also be ugly, vain, unpleasant hags. The non-human women are supernaturally monstrous “Yuki-Onna” (White Witch) and often violent.
Suuhi Yuki-onna
Yuki-onna by Sawaki Suushi / Public domain
A perfect example is the farmer's wife in “Of a Mirror and a Bell.” She covets the return of her bronze mirror, which had been given for melting down to make a temple bell, but it, alone among the mirrors, would not melt. In short, it was magically imbued with the woman's anger and covetousness. Hearn even reminds readers of the supposed old saying, “a mirror is the soul of a woman.”

One positive tale in which the woman's value is not dependent on her beauty, but perhaps her duty, introduces a milk nurse named O-Sodé who asks a divinity to trade her life for that of the now-sick girl she'd nursed 15 years earlier. In her remembrance, the family of the saved girl plants the best cherry tree they can find (“Ubazakura,” or “Cherry tree of the Milk Nurse” which has flowers of white and pink).

Men, in these tales, especially those of the samurai or priestly class, were generally treated more favorably, with wider character variation among both human men and divinities or magical beings.


Lafcadio Hearn in the 21st Century

Beyond the aforementioned shortcomings, however, I see much to enjoy in this cross-cultural experience of reading Hearn. In some ways, I can vicariously commune with Japanese culture through him. I was also pleasantly surprised to see parallels between the myths and legends of other cultures. Here are a few I picked up:


  • “The Story of Aoyagi” (Aoyagi means green willow) could find (new/old) fans of Edith Hamilton, Bulfinch et al, in its parallels with several Greco-Roman stories such as those of the united-in-death lovers Baucis and Philemon, or oak and linden.
  • “The Story of Kwashin Koji”: In this tale, a religious painting seems to undulate and show real, flowing blood. This recalls stories such as Wilde's “The Picture of Dorian Gray” or the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea.
  • In “Hi-Mawari,” a boy and his older friend (Robert, age 8) search for Welsh fairy rings but instead encounter a harper. The harper's music is said to be witchcraft. Fans of Greco-Roman mythology will quickly be reminded of the magical musician, Orpheus, who used a song to win his wife back from Hades.

All is Unreality—Even Us

Hiroshige, 36 Views of Mount Fuji Series 7
Woodblock print of cherry blossom
"Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji"
by Hiroshige / Public domain

It would be too simple to reduce Lafcadio Hearn to a purveyor of the strange, predicting the 20th century’s modernism and political upheavals. I like to think of Hearn's work as living and breathing, even in its preoccupation with the impermanence of life.

The collection will appeal to all lovers of uncanny short stories, from Poe to Neil Gaiman. Furthermore, the curious black and white illustrations of flying severed heads, faceless women, samurai, etc. will appeal to fans of anime and manga, I think. This volume also could draw in readers who appreciate the reverence for nature beyond simply the national symbol of the sakura (cherry blossom). “The Story of Aoyagi” is tailor-made for those who decry the cutting of forests.

Read the tales within Japanese Tale of Lafcadio Hearn. Even its foreword (by Jack Zipes) and introduction (Codrescu) are accessible to non-academics. Just remember—in the words of 14th century Buddhist priest Kenko: “All is unreality. Nothing is worth discussing, worth desiring.”

Japanese Tale of Lafcadio Hearn can be purchased on Amazon or via the Princeton University Press' website. It's part of Princeton's "Oddly Modern Fairy Tales" series.

Read our review of another book in this series: Workers' Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories from Great Britain




FOOTNOTES
*Modern novelist, Hanya Yanagihara, wrote in a recent essay in The New York Times Style Magazine, that “Japan without the cherry blossom is like a person without a head: The image is wrong, inconceivable.”

**From Hearn's Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904)


ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Leigh Smith writes strange tales herself, mostly under the pseudonym Leigh Ward-Smith. In the real world, she writes marketing copy, curates/manages social media for an architectural firm, and does research and editing for a retired professor. She occasionally blogs at Leigh's Wordsmithery (https://leighswordsmithery.wordpress.com/); likewise the occasional tweet @1WomanWordsmith.

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Caliph Stork by Wilhelm Hauff, Illustrated by Anton Lomaev

We discovered this gorgeous picture book just the other day and had to share the illustrations and this lesser-known fairy tale, The Story of Caliph Stork.

It may sound familiar as a version of the fairy tale was include in Andrew Lang's Green Fairy Book, but with such rich fodder for illustrators, and such a funny tale for storytellers to have fun with, it's surprising this isn't more well known.


The fairy tale actually has a distinct origin, written by German writer Wilhelm Hauff for his Märchen almanach auf das Jahr 1826 (Fairytale Almanac of 1826). (The Green Fairy Book retells story in chapters.)


Set in the nebulous 'Orient' (something the romantics were fascinated by, even though it was a fantasy) the plot could easily (today) be mistaken for something out of 1001 Nights. Source notes from one writer/storyteller, Aaron Shepard, who has won honors from the American Folklore Society, retold and published this tale (with very different, but also lovely illustrations by Alisher Dianov) tell us that despite it's German origin, that this tale is now told in the Middle East and has become part of their folklore!

Wow.



From Shepard's notes:
This tale—usually called “The Calif Stork” or “The Stork Calif”—is often classified as a folktale of Iraq; and folklorist Harold Courlander, who heard it twice from Muslim storytellers, believes it to be widely told in the Middle East. Yet its origin is The Caravan, a book of original fairy tales by nineteenth-century German writer Wilhelm Hauff. While folktales often make their way into written literature, in this case a written work has passed into folklore. My own retelling draws from both original and retold versions. 
The calif in this tale is patterned after Harun al-Rashid, made popular in the pages of The Thousand and One Nights.
The plot essentially goes :
The Caliph of Baghdad comes across a mysterious powder with an incantation on the bottle. It is said it can turn someone into any animal they wish. They must not, however, forget the incantation so they can turn back but above all, they must not laugh while as animals or they will be trapped in that form forever. Of course the Caliph (and his Vizier) become storks and get stuck. On a quest to find a cure, the encounter a large sad, owl, who tells them she is really the Princess of India, transformed by an evil imposter wizard, who now sits on the throne. They see an opportunity, via sneaky animal-eavesdropping and spy work, to become human again but there's a tricky clause in that one of them needs to promise his hand in marriage to the owl - without seeing what she looks like - otherwise the reversing will fail. All goes well and, of course, the princess is gorgeous, so the anxious Caliph is relieved.

If the illustration style of the images posted here, looks familiar it's because Anton Lomaev's illustrations for The Wild Swans have been circulating the internet constantly for about three years now, never failing to catch the eye (especially with all the golds and fire colors he includes in his images for that particular fairy tale. This one, however, is ultimately dominated by blues and mystery...





As an interesting tag to the tale, the sorcerer is sentenced to death while his son is given the choice of death or to smell the same black powder and become an animal forever. The son chooses the powder and becomes their pet, displayed in a cage in the garden for all to see. 
We love the last illustration in which the Caliph is making his children laugh by making fun of the Vizier when he was a stork. (And the Vizier is threatening to find that powder again as a result.)

And one day we will track down a physical copy of these lovely Lomaev illustrations (printed 2016) to put in the Fairy Tale Newsroom library!