Foreword

The twelfth-century Konjaku monogatari shu (Collection of tales from times now past) is the greatest work of Japanese setsuwa bungaku (tale literature), a genre that flourished between the ninth and thirteenth centuries but traces back to Japan’s earliest extant text, the eighth-century Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters). Tale literature notably impacted Noh drama and other Japanese art forms and continues to fascinate contemporary Japanese readers and writers. The Konjaku monogatari shu, which draws on countless Chinese and Japanese sources and echoes of which are found throughout classical and even modern Japanese literature, is also one of the world’s most expansive anthologies of tales, bringing together in thirty-one volumes more than one thousand sacred and secular stories about India (five volumes of Buddhist tales), China (five volumes of Buddhist and Confucian tales), and Japan (ten volumes of Buddhist tales and eleven volumes of secular tales). Partial translations of the Konjaku collection flourished outside East Asia beginning in the 1950s, with English-language readers particularly fortunate to have Robert Brower’s annotated translations of seventy-eight tales (The Konzyaku monogatarisyu: An Historical and Critical Introduction, 1952), followed by Susan Wilbur Jones’s Ages Ago: Thirty-Seven Tales from the Konjaku Collection (1959), Marian Ury’s Tales of Times Now Past: Sixty-Two Stories from a Medieval Japanese Collection (1979), Yoshiko Kurata Dykstra’s The Konjaku Tales, Indian Section (1986), and others. So significant are the Konjaku tales to early Japanese literature that selections from them appear in nearly all English-language anthologies of the classical Japanese corpus, most recently Haruo Shirane’s Traditional Japanese Literature: An Anthology, Beginnings to 1600 (2007, abridged version 2011).

Naoshi Koriyama and Bruce Allen’s masterful, elegant translations of ninety extraordinary tales from the Collection’s twenty-one volumes on Japan—many of which appear here for the first time in English translation—beautifully complement these venerated predecessors. Contributing significantly to understandings of pre-modern Japan, the present volume stands out in giving readers an unprecedented glimpse into the daily lives of early Japanese commoners, who are for the most part obscured in The Tale of Genji and the other celebrated court classics that have been of greatest interest to compilers of English-language world literature anthologies.

As Koriyama and Allen point out in their introduction, among the aspects of life in early Japan featured in the Konjaku monogatari shu is the relationship of Japanese communities with the natural world. Most significantly in our age of ecological crisis is how the tales grapple with major human changes to the Japanese countryside, revealing the tensions between religion’s spiritual callings to preserve nature and people’s need to hunt, fish, and farm to survive. East Asian literatures are famous for celebrating the beauties of nature and depicting people as intimately connected with the natural world. But in fact, because the region has a long history of transforming and exploiting nature, much of its creative work—including the Konjaku collection—highlights the complex, contradictory interactions between people and the nonhuman environment. In this and many other ways Japanese Tales from Times Past opens exciting and invaluable new windows on early Japanese society.

Karen Thornber
Professor of Comparative Literature
Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Harvard University