Review: The Legends of Tono: 100th Anniversary Edition

New US Edition of Classic Japanese Folktales Author: Dan Ross Source: Lexington Books Official 100th Anniversary Site (Japanese): tono100.com

The Legends of Tono (Tono Monogatari) is a book with a complicated history. In the prefecture of Iwate in the village of Tono a local folklorist, Kizen Sasaki (1886-1933), had been collecting the folktales of the region at the turn of the 20th Century. He was the sort of person who you might imagine walking from house to farm to field just conversing with the people of the land and mentally cataloging their reminiscences and anecdotes. In 1908 Sasaki had a chance meeting with Kunio Yanagita (1875-1962). Already an active writer in Tokyo, Yanagita was a fan of ghost stories ranging from Chinese folktales and Japanese classics to the Western stories of Grimm`s Fairy Tales. Meeting with Sasaki and hearing some of his local stories inspired him to take a trip to Tono and then finally to write this collection. Yanagita`s method was to listen to Sasaki`s reports and then visit the locales where they took place and then write the tales in his own words. So the book comprises the individual accounts of the people of Tono collected by Sasaki and then codified into a cohesive whole by Yanagita. Plus consideration of the careful translation by Ronald A. Morse, this was quite an enterprise. The current edition reviewed here is a new printing from Lexington Books on the 100th anniversary (1910 - 2010) of the first edition publication of the original Japanese book. The Legends of Tono is a surprisingly slim book with a total count of 116 pages. But within those pages are crammed a lot of precise information. A new preface by Morse to the 100th anniversary edition is appended before the original forward by American folklorist and professor Richard M. Dorson (1916-1981), and then comes the original Introduction by Morse. The introduction is rich with the history of the region and biographical info on Yanagita and Sasaki. This gives the reader ample knowledge and context for understanding what they are reading in The Legends of Tono. And then starting the book, Yanagita`s Preface gives his own personal account of visiting the Tono area.

The stories themselves are a collage of disparate elements coming together to create an overall feel of the area. It creates a real sense of place and time and feeling. The individual stories do not in totality have a singular purpose or moral as they are from a random cross section of anecdotes from different families and individuals. Some are first person accounts, some simply describe local customs and others are legends steeped in history and tradition. Some are as short as a sentence or paragraph while others are a page or more. There are prosaic stories grounded in local intrigue and murder and others dealing in the more fantastic. Deities, ghosts and yokai are presented and through this book the Kappa (a river imp) became popularized in Japanese pop culture. Though not a huge tome of esoteric lore, The Legends of Tono is a significant and important document that had, and still has today, a considerable impact on the Japanese folktale studies community and pop culture at large. Not only have a lot of story ideas been generated from this collection, but many take place in Tono itself. For instance SUMMER DAYS WITH COO (Kappa no Coo to Natsuyasumi, 2007), an animated movie about a boy who befriends a wayward Kappa from Tono. As of this writing prominent yokai expert and manga artist Shigeru Mizuki (Gegege no Kitaro) has been adapting The Legends of Tono to comic book form and that in turn is being adapted into an animated movie. The movie SHIGERU MIZUKI`S THE LEGENDS OF TONO (Mizuki Shigeru no Tono Monogatari) will premiere at the reopening of the Tono Municipal Museum this month (April 2010). The Legends of Tono: 100th Anniversary Edition Publisher: Lexington Books Release Date: September 2008 List Price: $27.95

For more information on yokai, please see the earlier coverage here on SciFi Japan: