Episode Details

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Three more tales from old Japan continue the shelf's second book — William Elliot Griffis's Japanese Fairy World. First, Little Silver's Dream of the Shoji: Ko Gin San, who did not care to dream of wonder-creatures, draws a tapir on her pillow-case — the beast who eats bad dreams — and dreams all the same: of the white water-ghosts who beg bottomless dippers from the sailors to swamp the junk, and of the island of the Shoji, the scarlet-haired wine-elves, building the storehouse where their King keeps the treasures of life, and health, and happiness, and property, which men throw away, or exchange for the saké he gives them. Then, The Tengus: Griffis's lore of the long-nosed elves of the mountains — the Dai Tengu with his fan of seven feathers, the crow-tengu who bears the axe of authority, the boy Yoshitsuné taught at the feet of the King of the Tengus on Kurama mountain, and the nose-fencing, nose tight-ropes and nose-balances that make a King of Noses. Last, Jiraiya, or the Magic Frog: Young Thunder, the castle-lord's son turned robber-chief, taught the magic of the frog by the mountain spirit Senso Dojin and charged to take from the wicked rich and help the needy; his marriage to Tsunadé, mistress of the snail's magic; the serpent-man Dragon-coil's venom poured on the sleeping couple, who lay near the point of death; and the boy Rikimatsu's flight on tengu wings to India for the one elixir that could cure them.

A note on the second and third tales. In The Tengus, one sentence of the old lore — the punishment the tengus visit on a boy caught lying — is not read here; the rest of the sketch stands whole. In Jiraiya, the clan wars are not narrated: the tale's battle passages — the toll of the conflicts between the two armies, and the closing battle in which Dragon-coil falls and the princess is freed — are left unread, as this series' standing treatment prescribes for this tale. The frog-magic, the serpent's venom, and the flight for the cure stand complete in Griffis's own words, and no completeness is claimed for the war.

Chapters:

00:05 Little Silver's Dream of the Shoji

07:52 The Tengus, or the Elves with Long Noses

15:16 Jiraiya, or the Magic Frog

From Japanese Fairy World by William Elliot Griffis (1880), public domain; told in fresh in-house renderings.

KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.