My series of Japanese fairy tales, “Classic Japanese Fairy Tales”, is one of my favorite projects because each of Mimei Ogawa’s stories manages to pack a significant message in a small, easy-to-understand form. This makes everything from story selection, translation, and editing a real joy, and these attributes also make these stories useful for those studying Japanese.
The highlight of the fifth installment of this series is a dark, atmospheric story titled “The Forest of a Dark Night,” which is about a woman who lives alone in the middle of a great forest. With nine chapters, it’s longer than the average story and a bit more difficult, but even so I think diligent students can get through the Japanese text (each book in this series contains stories in parallel English/Japanese as well as English-only versions). But I’ve also included two other stories that are shorter and more like typical Ogawa works.
The messages of some of these stories are a bit more cryptic than those in previous volumes, and I’m curious to hear your impressions and interpretations.
Thanks to Kaimai Mizuhiro (開米瑞浩) for helping confirm some of the meanings of the tricker passages. Also thanks to Jim Miles (of Annotranslate) for help proofreading the stories.
The e-book is now available on Amazon for only $0.99, and you can get the whole set of books (for a limited time) for only $4.99, which is a whole lot of bilingual stories for that price.