Japanese Tales

10 best books like Japanese Tales (Royall Tyler): Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, African Folktales, Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies, Latin American Folktales, Russian Fairy Tales, Favorite Folktales from Around the World, Folktales from India, French Folktales, Norwegian Folktales, Arab Folktales

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things
AuthorLafcadio Hearn
ISBN0804836620
A blind musician with amazing talent is called upon to perform for the dead. Faceless creatures haunt an unwary traveler. A beautiful woman — the personification of winter at its cruelest — ruthlessly kills unsuspecting mortals. These and 17 other chilling supernatural tales — based on legends,...
AuthorRoger D. Abrahams
Just like the others, I really enjoyed the tales, but not the commentary, which seemed excessive, superficial and a justification for the white scientist to have his name on the cover. Also, the grouping was weird (I would prefer by tribe), and the pictures of art objects seemed to be attached to fairy...
AuthorMoss Roberts
Quite a treasury. I liked the numerous short fables even better than the stories. And the introduction, that gives just a bit of historical context, esp. re the rivalry between the Confucians and the Taoists, is helpful.

My favorite is one of the very shortest:

"The Missing Axe

"A...
AuthorJohn Bierhorst
The wisdom and artistry of Latin America's storytellers preserve one of the world's richest folktale traditions—combining the lore of medieval Europe, the ancient Near East, and pre-Columbian America. Among the essential characters are the quiet man's wife who knew the Devil's secrets, the...
AuthorAlexander Afanasyev
ISBN0394730909
Translated by Norbert Guterman

Illustrated by Alexander Alexeieff

In this most comprehensive collection of classic Russian tales available in English we meet both universal fairy-tale figures—thieves and heroes, kings and peasants, beautiful damsels and terrifying witches,...
AuthorJane Yolen
Yolen, Jane. Favorite Folktales from Around the World (Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library) (1986).
Hero
The Iroquois story of "The Flying Head" tells the folktale of a giant head with wings that came out of its cheeks and a mouth full of fangs. This giant head would fly at night looking...
AuthorA.K. Ramanujan
An enchanting collection of 110 tales, translated from twenty-two different languages, that are by turns harrowing and comic, sardonic and allegorical, mysterious and romantic. Gods disguised as beggars and beasts, animals enacting Machiavellian intrigues, sagacious jesters and magical storytellers,...
AuthorHenri Pourrat
ISBN0679748334
Selected from Henri Pourrat's classic Le tresor des contes, one of the finest folktale collections in the world, these one-hundred-odd legends, fairy tales, devotional pieces, jokes, and animal stories from the rural provinces of France comprise a magical volume. Fairies, changelings, giants,...
AuthorPeter Christen Asbjørnsen
Long a treasure in Norway, the folktales collected by Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe have been acclaimed for their richness of humor, fullness of life, and depth of understanding since they first appeared in translation more than a hundred years ago. The Norwegian folktales, said Jacob...
AuthorInea Bushnaq
ISBN0394751795
While containing a broad sampling of folktales from the Arab people, there are a few problems that consistently bothered me about this book. The author, in her commentary, claims that "the true Arab is the desert nomad," an idea which folklorist Dwight Reynolds has said is culturally inaccurate and...
AuthorHenry Glassie
Robust and funny, sorrowful and heroic, this collection of 125 lively tales tells the story of Ireland. Spanning the centuries from the first wars of the ancient Irish kings through the Celtic Renaissance of Yeats to our own time, they are set in cities, villages, fields and forestsfrom the wild Gaelic...
AuthorRichard Erdoes
This magnificent collection gathers 160 tales from 80 tribal gathers to offer a rich and lively panorama of the Native American mythic heritage. From all across the continent come tales of creation and love, of heroes and war, of animals, tricksters, and the end of the world. Alfonso Ortiz, an eminent...
AuthorMichael Patrick Hearn
From Robert Browning’s Pied Piper of Hamelin and William Makepeace Thackeray’s Rose and the Ring to Kenneth Grahame’s Reluctant Dragon and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, here are seventeen classic stories and poems from the golden age of the English fairy tale. Some of them...
AuthorLone Thygesen Blecher
ISBN0816645752
Swedish Folktales and Legends is a diverse and representative collection of stories from Sweden's centuries-old folklore tradition. Ranging from the ribald to the romantic, from the rustic to the mythical, these are lively translations of 150 tales drawn from unique sources including the Swedish...
AuthorHoward Norman
ISBN0375702679
From Greenland to Siberia, from Alaska to Japan, from Canada to North Pole, here are more than one hundred folktales from more than thirty tribal peoples who make their home in the arctic and subarctic regions.By turns tragic and comic, fantastic and earthy, uncanny and profound, these tales transport...
AuthorJoanna Cole
ISBN0385189494
A great compendium of stories with the common hidden theme which you can find if you read them with your heart.

Some favorites:

Maid Lena: This story reveals that the source of our lack of energy and courage is the result of something being “dead at our center,” and the necessity...
AuthorAlgernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
ISBN0486440621
The member of a distinguished British literary family, A. B. Mitford traveled widely with his parents as a youth and lived in various European countries. From 1866-70, he served as an attaché with the British legation at Edo (Tokyo) — one of the first foreign diplomats to do so. During his brief stay...
AuthorBeatrice Silverman Weinreich
Filled with princesses and witches, dybbuks and wonder-working rebbes, the two hundred marvelous tales that make up this delightful compendium were gathered during the 1920s and 1930s by ethnographers in the small towns and villages of Eastern Europe. Collected from people of all walks of life,...
AuthorF. Hadland Davis
ISBN0486270459
The most popular myths and legends of Japanese culture are charmingly retold in English in this handsomely illustrated book. Here are myths of gods, heroes and warriors; legends of Buddha, and of the goddess Benten and the god Daikoku; tales of the sea and of Mount Fuji; accounts of superstitions and...
Japanese Ghosts and Demons: Art of the Supernatural
AuthorStephen Addiss
ISBN0807611263
I read simultaneously two books about Japanese spirits and the art that has been made to accompany the stories of these beings.

"Japanese Ghosts and Demons", published 30 years ago, is more scholarly and lacks the clean modern look of "Ghosts and Spirits". But I found that the detailed information...
Japanese Culture
AuthorH. Paul Varley
ISBN0824821521
For nearly three decades Japanese Culture has garnered high praise as an accurate and well-written introduction to Japanese history and culture. This widely used undergraduate text is now available in a new edition. Thoroughly updated, the fourth edition includes expanded sections on numerous...
Yokai Attack!: The Japanese Monster Survival Guide
AuthorHiroko Yoda
Yokai Attack! is a nightmare-inducing one-stop guide to Japan's traditional monsters and creepy-crawlies.

Yokai are ethereal sorts of beings, like ghosts, nearly always encountered at night; everyone has their own take on how they might look in real life and what sorts of specific characteristics...
Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai
AuthorMichael Dylan Foster
ISBN0520253620
Water sprites, mountain goblins, shape-shifting animals, and the monsters known as yôkai have long haunted the Japanese cultural landscape. This history of the strange and mysterious in Japan seeks out these creatures in folklore, encyclopedias, literature, art, science, games, manga, magazines,...
Legends of Tono (Anniversary)
AuthorKunio Yanagita
ISBN0739127675
In 1910, when Kunio Yanagita (1875-1962) wrote and published The Legends of Tono in Japanese, he had no idea that 100 years later, his book would become a Japanese literary and folklore classic. Yanagita is best remembered as the founder of Japanese folklore studies, and Ronald Morse transcends time...
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