Ages Ago: Thirty-Seven Tales from the Konjaku Monogatari Collection
Susan Wilbur Jones (Translator)
"Ages Ago, the title of this book, is a translation of "konjaku," the phrase which opens each of the thousand tales of the Japanese Konjaku Monogatari Collection. Although it is one of the great medieval story collections and a typical work of the Japanese 11th century, which has already given us Lady Murasaki's Genji, the Konjaku has never before been published, even in part, in any Western language. In the Japanese section of these thirty-seven tales, the view of wonderful Kyōto, T'ang-style capital of a T'ang-style bureaucracy, offered in Genji, is extended to include further areas and persons of every calling. So realistic is the approach that many tales may be located by street and avenue on a guide-book map, and the bridge shown tourists as one of the eight most beautiful sights of Lake Biwa figures in a particularly lurid ghost story. As the Japanese Tales portray this outer world of factual detail, the Indian and Chinese sections give some idea of contemporary inner life as well - the stories of Buddhist preachers, Confucian and Taoist anecdotes, and a prose retelling of the T'ang ballad that ran like a refrain through Genji and gave the West its willow porcelain. Students of comparative literature will find interesting the form taken in the Far East by migratory tales reaching the West through Aesop and the Panchatantra, and by the Alcestis legend, while students of Zen Buddhism will discover the only document known to exist about Zen's traditional founder, Bodhidharma, in India, as well as one throwing further light on this coming to China." -- Dust Jacket
Print Book, English, 1959
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1959