Review: Japanese Fairy Tales and Others

Japanese Fairy Tales and Others by Lafcadio Hearn
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I finished this book because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the nature and limits of cultural appropriation.

I started it because I read, somewhere, a tantalizing description of one of the 16 stories here, “The Boy Who Drew Cats.” It’s still a great overview, I think: a young boy who always draws cats to calm himself is locked in a temple haunted by a terrifying mouse demon. He draws his pictures before falling asleep and then awakens to find the monster dead. He has no idea what happened until he looks at his drawings, unchanged from the night before with the exception that they now have blood dripping from their maws.

As evocative as that account may be, it’s told with no more narrative skill than the summary I give. Hearn makes evident throughout that he’s writing for children, so he avoids tension and depth. Everything’s flattened – and this may be the best story of the collection – so I was tempted to put it down almost as soon as I picked it up.

Still, it struck me that Hearn was up to something here, something that likely seemed innocent and even admirable in 1953 but that seems culturally tone deaf today.

The introduction reports that he lived in Japan for many years, which our introduction reports in order to give him credibility despite his “Greek and Irish parents.” You can see in that quick biography, though, that even then there was a mite of concern for what we now see as potentially appalling. This is not his culture, yet he is claiming authorship over some representation of it.

I have mixed feelings on the whole claim of cultural appropriation. I think, for instance, of Paul Simon and his working with Ladysmith Black Mambazo. That was a marriage of styles, and Simon always made sure to credit his South African collaborators as partners in the process of creation. Yeah, he got the lion’s share of the profits and the credit, but he also brought a powerful celebrity standing to the project. He heard a way to make their music accessible, and he had much to do with turning them into international figures in their own right.

I also believe it’s essential that we grant authors the right to “tell the stories of others.” Of course it’s often a positive when a woman writes from a man’s perspective. Take the brilliant example of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead for one. I think it has to be true of men as well, provided in all cases it’s not a matter of a gimmick but rather an exploration of the world in full.

Those thoughts aside, this book depends on the exotic nature of the materials it’s appropriating. Hearn isn’t attempting to Westernize what he’s heard or adapted. That is, he doesn’t try to turn these into stories that follow the convention of a character who learns anything about apprehending the world. Instead, each depends upon a measure of foreignness. They seem supposed to “work” by reminding us of the inaccessibility of the Japanese imagination.

At least two of these turn on characters who are confused because they have never seen a mirror before. The characters in each believe they are seeing a deceased older relative as they look upon their own faces and remember the ones gone. It speaks to a condescension that infects many of the other stories.

I don’t doubt that Hearn, if he were still alive, would defend himself by claiming a great friendship with many Japanese, and I am certain there’s something to his having lived so long in the country, especially after the devastation of World War II.

With that in mind, I don’t pretend to critique this as I would have done if I’d read it in 1953. I’m reading it 66 years later in a changed understanding of culture. In that light, this is a troubling collection that invites us to take comfort in our superior understanding of the world. We’re asked to at some of the marvels these flattened characters come across, but we’re not supposed to see them as people we might somehow fully commune with. I’d love to try my hand at telling the story of the boy who drew cats, but I’m not sure at the moment that I’d know how. For now, this one goes back to the library shelf and likely stays there.


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