Japanese Fairy Tales

This collection of Japanese Fairy Tales that Kevin got me for Christmas was world better than the collection of Hawaiian myths. The stories had actual plots and mostly sensible characters. As sensible as any fairy tale characters are anyway. It helped immensely that this collection was written by a Japanese woman who was deeply familiar with both the stories and the English language.

The collection wasn't perfect. I enjoyed reading it, but I still struggled a lot. That said, I'm more willing to attribute those struggles to my lack of familiarity with the culture rather than the authors. Every now and then a turn of phrase or a plot point would catch me completely off guard. It made reading a bit difficult, but the good kind of difficult.

My favorite stories were the ones that involved the Dragon King of the Sea. He pops up every now and then to aid good people, punish evil people, or just lead them astray. But he's so completely alien that he was a lot of fun to read about. Except for the story about how the jellyfish lost it's bones, which was horrifying.

The thing about this collection that surprised me the most was that the evil characters were redeemed as often as not. Sometimes they were punished horribly. But sometimes they were punished a little, just enough to get them to see the error of their ways. Then they went on to live happy and fulfilling lives. That's not an ending I'm used to seeing in fairy tales, but maybe it ought to be.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shadows of Self

Let's dive right into the biggest problem I had with this book, which is Sanderson's treatment of Lessie. Wax's lady-love, in a classic case of fridging, gets killed in the prologue of The Alloy of Law , giving Wax a reason to return to the big city and mope around for a while. She turns back up in the prologue of this book, which details how she and Wax met. And at first I was excited to get a bit more backstory. I wondered if maybe all the prologues would be about her, letting her be more than the awesome woman who died to give Wax some man-pain. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, the prologue was just there to remind us that she existed. Until it's revealed at the very end of the book that she's been alive all along, having faked her own death on God's orders. (It makes slightly more sense than that.) This comes up just in time for her to die in Wax's arms again, sending him into a fresh bout of grief plus bonus loss of faith in God. That'
Read more

Specials

I have to admit that the conclusion to this trilogy felt a little flat to me. There were definitely some good things, and I still think the series as a whole is good and tackles interesting questions with some good nuance. I even liked the actual ending of the story. But so much of this book felt like a rehash of the second one that I felt a little bored by the end of it. Once again, Tally has had her brain rewired, and once again she sets out into the wilderness where he solitude helps her figure out what she actually wants. The love triangle sort of fizzles out and the stakes are revealed to be not nearly as high as it seemed. What felt like a worldwide conspiracy is mostly confined to one city, and Tally's role shifts. She does help save the world, but it's more about preventing a war than ushering a grand revolution. Which isn't to say that the revolution doesn't happen. But it's not the complete overthrow of society that the rebels wanted. And that's pr
Read more

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

NK Jemisin's debut novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms  is different from the majority of fantasy I've read lately. There's no grand adventure or epic battle.At it's heart, this book has more to do with family politics than anything else. Some millenia before this book begins, the three main gods got into a fight that escalated into a war. Ultimately one was killed, one was enslaved in human form, and the third took it upon himself to be the grand ruler of all. The world has been a little off-balance ever since, as exemplified by the cruel and twisted ruling family, the Arameri. But this story focuses on Yeine, newly named heir of the current ruler, Dekarta, despite the fact that her mother was disowned for marrying her father. She finds herself summoned to the capital city, where she must navigate not only her own family politics, but those of the gods who are kept as slaves. The story isn't entirely linear, which I usually love. It mostly works
Read more