Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/290

 250 Reviews.

result is one of the most pleasing volumes of Messrs. Black's " Beautiful Books."

The folk-tales, as distinct from historical traditions and little novels of travel or domestic tragedy, form about two-thirds of the total of sixty tales, and are of surprising freshness and variety. Hardly one of them has a parallel or variant in the numerous other collections of Japanese stories. Chinese influence can be traced in the magician of " The Hermit's Cave," and perhaps also in the spirits which animate kakemo?io pictures in two of the stories. Western and Arabian traditions are brought to mind by "A Carp gives a Lesson in Perseverance" and "A Life saved by a Spider and Two Doves." In the former, the dullest pupil of a famous painter leaves the school in despair, and sees a carp trying, persistently and at last successfully, to force its way through the ice of a pond to a bit of rice biscuit. The pupil resolves to con- tinue his own efforts until he succeeds or dies, and finally becomes one of Japan's greatest painters, taking the leaping carp as his crest. In the other story, the famous twelfth-century founder of the Shogunate, Yoritomo, when hidden in a hollow tree is saved from his pursuers by two doves flying out from the trunk and by the spider's web which covers the opening, as it did that of the cave which hid the Prophet of Allah. This incident is a favourite in Japanese art, and is told less fully in other collections. (Is the expansion by our author himself? No narrator is named.)

Many of the tales are about ghosts, and throw light on the popular ideas of that shadowy Eastern Afterworld which is in some ways so like and yet so unlike the Greek Hades. Japanese fond- ness for ghost tales has given birth to the favourite games Hiyaku Monogatari and Kon Dame Shi, in which, after the telling of each tale, in one case one of 100 lights in the room is extinguished (until the room is at last quite dark and a ghost is expected to appear), and in the other some object must be brought from a cemetery or other ghostly place. A game of this type is the setting of Mr. Gordon Smith's "The Snow Tomb," but there is some confusion in its description. The ghosts in these stories return to the land of the living to seek revenge, to fulfil a task, and to warn survivors. The ghost of a blind shampooer destroys his faithless wife and her lover, the ghost of an old nurse digs up