Otogibanashi - Folktales of Japan

I've recently been doing a bit of research on Japanese Folktales for another class of mine, and after a presentation on the concept by a few of my classmates in my Japanese Society class, it became strikingly clear to me that the Japanese have a very familiar folktale structure to the one we as westerners are used to. Many of the tales ive explored are remarkably similar in their moral and virtue, some so similar they directly relate to tales we have analyzed in class.

In Japan, folktales are referred to as Otogibanashi. These tales have received strong influence from Japanese Shinto and Buddhist beliefs and often deal with supernatural beings like kami's, the many gods the japanese have interpreted from nature throughout past centuries. The Japanese also distinguish between 3 basic types of folktales, with the Namidabanashi tales dealing with sadness, Obakebanashi tales focusing on ghosts and Ongaeshibanashi tales dealing with repaying kindness. The tales always tell a story based on distinct factors of visual and emotional beauty, and there are many more categories to be found in Japanese folktales, but these three do represent some of the most common tales found today.

A tale that i certainly found similar to our version of Bluebeard was the tale of Uguisu no Sato which translates to something like "a bush warbler and the house". It tells the tale of a woodcutter that stumbles upon a beautiful house in a hidden grove. Inside he found a beautiful woman that is busy and wants the woodcutter to take care of her home while she goes out. She instructs him to never look in any of the reception rooms during her absence but as in our tale, curiosity overcomes the woodcutter and he dares to look in the other rooms, where he finds many riches and beautiful furniture following a theme of the four seasons, along with three eggs which he accidentally breaks . At this point the woman returns, complains about the mans insincerity and transforms her self into a bush warbler. She then flies off singing "i miss my children," at which point the woodcutter suddenly finds himself in a field with the house and everything valuable gone.

I was stunned at how similar this tale was and although its hard to determine when exactly this tale found its origins, it still seemed as though Japanese folktales are remarkably similar to the ones we have in our society. Although these similarities are very clear, it seems that the Japanese have a much larger emphasis on portraying natural beauty and their concepts of "wabi sabi" or basically the concept of finding beauty in the imperfections of nature. This seems to make the tales I've read more peaceful in their nature, although they can often be just as graphic as our tales from Perrault and the Grimm Brothers.