Fox Tales

Definitely a collection that will make you think a little differently about Kyoto - which isn???t all that difficult, since I???ve been to the city and wandered around some of the back streets at night in search of a chocolate shop that sells chocolate-flavored sake and I KNOW just how spooky those backroads can be.

(In case you all think I???m making this up to be in line with the book: the shop exists. It???s called Dari K, and they have a genuinely wonderful mission supporting environmental protection and Indonesian cacao farmers - though I don???t think they???re selling their chocolate-flavored sake anymore, which SUCKS as I had high hopes of getting it if I went back to Japan again. Their site is here: https://www.dari-k.com/)

Anyway: the collection isn???t out-and-out scary, so much as eerie, though there are moments in each individual story where I had to just stop reading and wait for daylight, which means that those moments are ones I find GENUINELY terrifying and therefore I need daylight to mitigate the effect a bit because I am a scaredy-cat. But apart from those individual scenes, what drives the eeriness of the stories in general is how they make the reader question whether or not what they???re reading is true. This is especially true when reading the first story (???Fox Tales???) and the second story (???The Dragon in the Fruit???) one after the other. There???s a bit of Rashomon Effect going on in the interplay between those two, which is a thought I find personally intriguing because of the place Akutagawa Ryunosuke occupies in Japanese literary history, and of course the influence of Kurosawa Akira???s film that gave us the term ???Rashomon Effect??? in the first place. The third and fourth stories aren???t as tightly connected as the first two, but do share the presence of water and the rivers and waterways of Kyoto. The blurb says the stories are tied to a curio shop, and while said curio shop DOES appear across all the stories, it only really plays a major role in the first two stories and then only a relatively minor role in the third and fourth. In terms of grouping, I think the first and second stories are a more or less coherent set, and the third and fourth stories are another more or less coherent set.

Overall, a lovely collection of stories, with just the right notes of eerie and creepy to be enjoyable for someone who???s doesn???t like their horror to be gory and prefers the spookiness to linger instead. I can???t speak to the quality of the translation as I haven???t read the original, but I think Bird has done a pretty good job with it overall, since I didn???t get irritated with the stories at any point. Also: I think these stories would make absolutely scary manga or animated short films, because as I said, some of the scenes are TERRIFYING just reading them from the page, so I can only imagine how much scarier they???d be in the hands of a good mangaka or animation studio.