Japanese Legend Collection

Introduction

In the six months or so between the end of the year before last and last summer, when the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun* advertised for the call of folk legends and fairy tales, the number of reports that reached me directly or indirectly under certain conditions reached a large number, in the hundreds. From the materials contained in these hundreds of reports, this "Japanese Legend Collection" is a collection of about 250 legends that have been picked up, classified under careful scrutiny and criticism, and written down simply, with two conditions: on the one hand, adhering to strict selection criteria and on the other, respecting the will of reporters. Since this was subject to various contracts from the beginning, it is only natural that a complete thing could not have been made, but it is not easy to make something a little closer to my ideal. However, these approximately 250 legends distributed throughout the country perfectly represent almost all types and forms of Japanese folk legends as shown in the classification tables. The appearance of this booklet is at least a great fact in our current society, where we have yet to have a single collection of folk legends to name it in the strict sense of the word, and where no fully reliable established theory has yet been presented regarding the study of folk legends. It was not only bad for reporters to leave precious materials lying at the bottom of a box for so long but equally bad for a society that craved this kind of achievement, so I finally negotiated with the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun Company this time to present it in my own hands.

adhere（動）付ける

approximately（副）およそ

disribute（動）分布する

table（名）表

booklet（名）小冊子

established theory......定説

crave（動）切望する、強く望む

If fortunately, the publication of this booklet has achieved any of my stated objectives, it is entirely to the credit of the original planner, the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, and the reporters who sympathized with the project and spared no effort in reporting. I would like to express my sincere thanks to you and pray for your future support.

Explanatory Note

(1) To make each volume's description as simple as possible and to cover as much material as possible in limited space, the author wrote his own handwriting and rewrote the reporters' text. However, I have taken great pains to preserve the nuances of the original text as much as possible.

(2) The names and addresses of the reporters are given in parentheses at the end of each story unless otherwise noted. The △ mark is an indirectly reported story and the name of the first person to report it. The locations of the stages of all the legends are described in the text, but for natural legends, the names of the countries in parentheses at the end of each story can be considered as the locations of legends.

(3) Some of the names in the table of contents classification are 90% invented by the author, so explanations are added for each in the commentary section. By the way, I think I have explained the structure of this whole book by myself in the classification chart, so I have nothing more to say.

parenthesis（名）丸括弧

*Tokyo Asahi Shimbun: A newspaper derived from Jiyu-to (Lamp of Liberty), which was founded in 1884 by politician Toru Hoshi. In 1888, it was acquired by the Osaka Asahi Shimbun Company and became the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, with sales exceeding 100,000 copies in 1900. It was renamed the Asahi Shimbun in 1940 and continues to this day.