Japanese Tales

This collection presents short medieval Japanese narratives - setsuwa of monks, officials, ghosts, foxes, dreams, and sudden wonders - drawn from older tale compilations and arranged by theme rather than by a single source book. Pieces run from a paragraph to a few pages: jokes about greedy priests, bargains with the otherworld, oddities of appetite and luck, and moral shocks in ordinary streets. Deities, demons, and human fools share the same matter-of-fact tone. The book is a reader's treasury of premodern popular story, not a novel and not a systematic mythology of Shinto or Buddhism.

Bound in picture blocked blue cloth. Frontispiece, 7 colour illustrations, including 4 double-page spreads, and 17 integrated black & white drawings. Printed endpapers. Silver page tops. Image blocked and die-cut blue slipcase.