Reading Notes: Japanese Fairy Tales, Part B

The second half of this reading delivered: more animal stories and characters. However, the human characters were a little different than the virtuous human characters in the first half of the reading.

The tale of Uraschimataro and the Turtle was the biggest outlier in both days' readings. The main character witnesses his share of magic, marries the Sea Princess, and very nearly ends his own story in total happiness. The problem begins when he returns to his home and sees that his parents are dead. This grief causes him to second-guess his wife's instructions to refrain from opening the golden box she gave him. When he opens it, his age catches up with him and he withers and dies within what seem to be hours. What's the purpose of this? Is there an obscure lesson to be learned here? Obey your spouse? It comes off as if the Sea Princess is testing Uraschimataro by giving him the box in the first place. Or maybe it's just a fairy story.

The merchant in The Magic Kettle wasn't conventionally good or bad--the story simply called on him to be humble and share his wealth with the farmer from whom he bought the kettle. It's a simple story. Beyond that lesson, the story also serves to introduce the tanuki. In The Magic Kettle, the tanuki isn't wicked yet. Maybe it's a different tanuki than the one in the next two stories, who killed his own wife out of greed and neglects his child. In another story, the tanuki kills, cooks, and serves a human man his wife.

After doing a little research, I found out that the tanuki is a real creature--a subspecies of of the Asian raccoon dog. In Japanese folklore, tanuki are known to be similar to kitsune (fox demons), and can shapeshift into and/or possess humans.

Sources:
Andrew Lang's Japanese Fairy Tales
Wikipedia: Japanese Raccoon Dog

Image:
Tanuki by 663highland