30 Nights with the Tanuki: Shape-shifter. Drummer. Fool.
He shape-shifts into a tea kettle and gets put on the fire. He pays for a meal in gold coins that turn to leaves before dawn. He takes Buddhist orders for thirty-one years before anyone notices the feet. He becomes a monk, a merchant, a wife, a daimyō's retainer-and somewhere, always, gets a detail wrong. He is caught by his tail, his paws, his eyes, the dog at the theater. He has been losing to rabbits and priests for a thousand years. And the tradition, where it fears the fox, loves him for exactly this.
30 Nights with the Tanuki gathers thirty of these stories in polished, atmospheric, modern English prose. Each tale is drawn from the Japanese folk tradition-from the Edo-period otogi-zōshi to Sekien's illustrated yōkai compendia to the Meiji children's-literature corpus of Iwaya Sazanami-and retold for the contemporary reader who wants to be immersed, not lectured.
The stories include:
The Kettle at Morin-ji - Shukaku, the tea-master tanuki who served his temple in the shape of an iron kettle for two hundred years, until the day the new abbot lit the fireKachi-kachi Yama - the darkest of the classical cycles, in which a quiet rabbit-neighbor walks across an old farmer's yard to settle a matter, fire by fire, poultice by poultice, oar by oarThe Tanuki Who Took a Wife - a forty-one-year marriage in the upper Kiso valley, a son who never outgrew wild ginger, and a confession on the last afternoon of an ordinary lifeThe Straw Hat, the Sake Jug - how the iconic Shigaraki pottery tanuki, the one outside every restaurant in Japan, sat down on a potter's step in 1899 and asked to be drawn correctlyThe Awa Tanuki War - the nineteenth-century Awa Tanuki Gassen, in which two regional tanuki clans fought a generation-long war on the island of Shikoku, with the hero Kinchō at the head of his peoplePlus the unseen drummer in the moonlit field, the tightrope kettle, the urban tanuki-bayashi of Edo, the tanuki who out-drummed a monk at Shōjōji, the tanuki at the public bath who paid in real coin for twenty-four years, and the tanuki on the modern expressway who was, in the end, just a tanuki.
Each story includes:
The Night Before - a brief atmospheric scene-setter that draws you into the story's worldOne Word (一語) - a single Japanese word explored in a short essay, opening a window into something English cannot quite reachOn This Story - source notes, historical context, and the real geography behind each taleNo prior knowledge of Japan required. The stories are self-contained, the Japanese terms are translated, and the cultural context is woven in naturally. Whether you're a lifelong Japan enthusiast, a folklore and mythology reader, a dark fantasy fan, or someone who simply loves a well-told story, this book was written for you.
Read one story per night. Listen for the drum. And if you hear it in the field, don't follow it.
Part of the 30 Nights with... series - each volume explores a different creature from Japanese folklore.
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