Tales of Times Now Past: 62 Stories from Medieval Japanese Collection

by Marian Ury

Tales of Times Now 62 Stories from Medieval Japanese Collection

Genres: Short Stories, Japanese Literature, Literature, Fiction, Japan, Classics

Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Brendan Coster · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the stories were pretty interesting. Having read much of the classic poetry up to the Kamakura period, I was missing the prose tales. This one was just the Konjaku, so the stories were almost all (if only at the end) modified to make a point as part of a Buddhist sermon. I'm already into Royall Tyler's (who's translations I find superior) "Japanese Tales" which covers most of the same materials, but pulls in stories from a number of other collections and tales. Anyways, the Konjaku Tales I've read in there are already far clearer and more interesting then what Marian Ury did in this volume.

Anyways, I'll probably leave off my "short stories" review for Tylers book when I'm finished.

You too could probably skip this and track down "Japanese Tales" and have yourself a much better experience. Not that Ury's version is bad, just in comparison it's bland and doesn't do the content justice.

[Nanako Water · Rating 5 out of 5]

This translation sixty-two short stories come from the Konjaku monogatari shu, a collection of over a thousand stories (some originally from India and China) collected around the year 1120 by an unknown monk in Japan. Yes, that's about 900 years ago! These stories are a mix of practical, religious, supernatural, and absurd tales--some of which were later rewritten as short stories, children's stories and even movies. I was particularly interested in the Buddhist and secular tales of Japan. One tale, "How a Falconer in the Western Part of the Capital Renounced Secular Life Because of a Dream" I recognized as a story about a duck hunter in a children's book, and another tale, "How a Man Who was Accompanying His Wife to Tanba Province Got Trussed up at Oeyama" was the basis for "In a Grove" (藪の中 Yabu no Naka) a 1922 short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Akira Kurosawa then used this story as the basis for the plot of his award-winning movie Rashōmon. This book gave me an appreciation for the wealth of Japanese literature and its long history.