Week 7 Reading Diary: Japanese Fairy Tales

This sign pretty much sums up the tanuki stories
in this unit: Mind the tanuki!
(Wikipedia Commons)

Once again I did a half-reading for this week, and since I liked the Japanese mythology unit that I read last week, I decided to go through the second half of the Japanese fairy tales. These were all really good reads, with all of them emphasizing animal characters of varying moral inclination. I liked how a lot of these stories emphasize animal-human partnerships, like the young man and the dog Schippeitaro, the peasant and the hare, and Uraschimataro and the turtle.

"Schippeitaro" was a nice coming-of-age type story about a young man who has set out to become a man by gaining fame through accomplishing great deeds. He veritably stumbles across the opportunity to do so when he finds himself stuck in a chapel where some fierce cats come along to party. I thought it was pretty remarkable how the boy is able to utilize a phrase that he overhears at that time--"Do not tell Schippeitaro"-- to such great advantage later. The protagonist's most impressive trait in this story isn't his physical strength, but his cleverness in making the connection between the ritual sacrifice of a maiden to the chapel he stayed in and the cats he encountered who appear to so fear this Schippeitaro. The dog himself plays a very minor role in the story compared to the other animal partners that are featured in this unit, but it was still pretty cool to see how the canine cleverly cooperates with the protagonist's scheme of hiding him in a basket until the time of attack.

Three of the stories in the second half focus on the tanuki. I found it interesting how the tanuki's morality is highly variable from story to story. In some ways the tanuki reminds me of the Native American trickster animal Coyote. As with the coyote, the tanuki may do good or evil, but its defining point is its unpredictability and chaotic tendencies. The tanuki in "The Magic Kettle" is at first a troublemaker, but once Jimmu makes the effort to communicate with it, they come to an understanding and the trickster's powers are able to be harnessed to positive effect. The next stories, however, show another, darker side of the tanuki. These stories show that mere mischief has the capacity to escalate to outright evil. When such evils occur, the perpetrator must be punished. In true ironic fashion, the evil tanuki in "How the Wicked Tanuki Was Punished" and "The Slaying of the Tanuki." meets his end through trickery.

On a side note, what's with the fixation on people being tricked into unintentionally eating their loved ones in mythology? This is the second time I've encountered it now, with the first being in the Khasi folktale "The Leap of Ka Likai." It's disturbing.

Umm... that's  not like any tanuki I've seen pictures of. (Un-textbook)

That's more like it! (Wikipedia)