From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl: Contemporary Japanese Fairy-Tale Adaptations in Conversation with the West by Mayako Murai, and: Japanese Animal-Wife Tales: Narrating Gender Reality in Japanese Folktale Tradition by Fumihiko Kobayashi (review)

Despite the wealth of folktale and fairy-tale research in Japan, relatively little of this work has appeared in English. Certainly, collections of folktales assembled by folklore scholars are available, as are English adaptations and translations of fairy tales by celebrities like Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) and Iwaya Sazanami (1870–1933).¹ These publications date mostly from the early- to mid-twentieth century, when folklore studies, a modern-born and transnational discipline, was at its most popular and active—fueled by the particular orientalisms then in vogue.² In recent decades there have been only three book-length studies on Japanese folktales in English; the two works under review build upon, and challenge, this scholarly history.³

As the varying titles of older studies suggest, making clear distinctions between the terms “folktale” and “fairy tale” is problematic.⁴ Fumihiko Kobayashi and Mayako Murai do not offer any further clarification on this old debate, choosing instead to ally themselves with the conventional English understanding of the terms. In other words, Kobayashi’s work on “folktales” is a more conventional folklore study, i.e., a comparative analysis of tales in their most spare, unembellished format as found in the type and motif indexes compiled by Seki and others (see note 3). Murai’s choice of the term “fairy tale,” on the other hand, indicates her interest in overtly literary creations adapted from folkloric source material.

Kobayashi’s structuralist approach to “demystifying” gendered behavior in Japanese animal-wife tales is of a type now unfashionable in English-language scholarship (p. 4): newer publications on the topic of Japanese folk studies (minzokugaku) have tended to focus on the cultural and ideological significance of the discipline itself rather than on folkloristic or ethnological readings of the data collected by its practitioners.⁵ Modern literature scholars have largely avoided folktales as subject material, in some measure because folklore study has gradually moved away from the mainstream of literary scholarship over the course of the past century, both in Japan and abroad. Scholars of premodern Japanese literature often study some of the same sources consulted by folklorists, such as Konjaku monogatari shū, but they generally do not consider themselves scholars of oral narrative (kōshō bungei).⁶ Given these trends, Kobayashi’s desire to unearth a feminist agenda in traditional folktales is something of an anomaly in current English-language literature on Japanese folktales.

Like Kobayashi, Murai is aware that the feminist reading she pursues is not a common approach in Japanese scholarship. However, she more clearly situates her study among the various discourses in which she participates. Her treatment of contemporary literary and visual art, for example, consciously moves beyond the traditional oral vs. literary debate that has long dominated fairy-tale scholarship. Further, she notes that because fairy tales in their modern incarnation have been directed primarily at children, many scholars in Japan have examined how the genre was (re)born through translations from Western languages.⁷ Focusing on the ways in which Japanese female authors and artists have appropriated “children’s fairy tales” for mature audiences, then, also represents a view still rare in Japanese scholarship. Finally, her emphasis on Japanese women’s aggressive adaptations of Western fairy tales clearly counters common orientalist views that “essentializ[e] the Japanese fairy tale as a reflection of the Japanese psyche and femininity conceived as the exact opposite of the Western psyche and masculinity” (p. 142).

In their quest to produce feminist readings of their sources, Kobayashi and Murai also distinguish themselves by emphasizing a cross-cultural approach. Kobayashi, who relies on “folktale corpora and tale-type indexes” for his...