Reading Diary Part A Week 7

Japanese Goldfish

Japanese Fairy Tale Unit (Ozaki)

My Lord Bag of Rice

For some reason this reminds me of a mix of Beowulf and an Arthurian quest type of story. The spin of the dragon turning into a man is a nice twist. I wonder if most of the Japanese tales have people changing from animals to humans. So saliva is deadly to centipedes, but why did the weather and everything else goto crap once the centipede was killed? Hmmmmm, the rewards seem to be a bit crazy, the rice however reminded me of Jesus and the bread and fish miracle.

The golden boy

Like the other story this one focuses more on the surroundings of the action rather than the battle. While it is the end that brings the boy the glory, this story focuses on his upbringing and life as a child and there is very little about his adult life.

The man who did not wish to die



I didn’t know that hermits were like superhuman. I always just thought of them as being more a monk type of figure. A land without death or disease? These people wanted to die, so this is kind of a mirror of the wants of the main character. So this story teaches the value of death and how knowing you are going to die makes you appreciate living each day. The people in the perpetual life town could not be happy because there was no fear of death so everything was taken for granted.

Bibliography

Japanese Fairy Tales by Yei Theodora Ozaki in the untexbooks web page http://mythfolklore.blogspot.com/2014/06/myth-folklore-unit-japanese-fairy-tales.html

Picture Attribution

Ryukin goldfish, Plate XIX in: "Goldfish and Their Culture in Japan", by Shinnosuke Matsubara. Bulletin of the Bureau of Fisheries, Vol. XXVIII 1908, Part I. P. 397.
Scan from the NOAA Photo Library:
Image ID: Image ID: fish3168, Fisheries Collection