Reading Notes: Japanese Fairy Tales, Part B

http://mythfolklore.blogspot.com/2014/05/myth-folklore-unit-japanese-fairy-tales.html

     For this weeks reading, I chose "Japanese Fairy Tales (Lang), retold by Andrew Lang (link posted above). Before I even started reading the stories listed for part B, I noticed that they were all single page stories and that there were only six of them, so I was already really interested to see just how short but detailed the stories were. 

     The first story I found myself drawn to was the one titled "The Magic Kettle". The story was about an old man who lived up in the mountains. One day a magic kettle appeared in his house and a mysterious creature came from it. The creature was going crazy until he and the kettle was sold to a man titled Jimmu. The story ends with the older man dying after the kettle had brought him and Jimmu years of luck. Overall, I really liked the story although I found it hard to follow at some points. There was a lot of detail, but not enough that it felt like the story dragged on. I personally thought that the story jumped around quite a bit, so that is something I will avoid while writing my own stories. 

     The next story that caught my eye was the one titled "Schippeitaro". The name alone had me interested in the story because it told me nothing about the story. This one is about a young man going on his wright of passage since he had reached manhood. He took to the streets to find adventure. The story follows this young man as he travels through mountains and other areas, where he met different characters, including one called the Spirit of the Mountain. Overall, I did like this story, although it was not one of my favorites. I feel that stories of young men and women going on adventures and hitting road blocks along the way are kind of overdone, and there was nothing in this story that made it special or made it stand out from others that I have read. I think if I were to write a story based on this one, I would write it from a different point of view, and I would try to do something that is harder to find in stories like this one.