Today was not an easy day. It started when I read a Grimm fairy tale, The Strange Musician, that seemed to me yet another divisive, frivolous tale encouraging conflict over communication, an upsetting change from the Japanese stories I had been reading for a few days. I began debating with myself whether it was even worth it to keep reading the Grimms' stories, or whether all I would ever learn from them would be contrary to the lessons they seemed to be trying to teach. Unfortunately, with this minor conflict clouding my mind, I was later brought two very sobering pieces of news, the first being that a child at Lemberg had lost a family member in the Haitian earthquake (which, much to my dismay, I was just learning of this afternoon), and the second being that my paternal grandmother's health had gone into even further decline from its already precipitous state.
With such things hanging over my head, I naturally began to question the nature of the work that I'm doing with this blog. In times of great sorrow, do children's stories and folktales really have any place in our daily lives? Can I read silly fantasies with simple morals when events in the real world are so grave and require such immediate attention? The answer, of course, is yes, and this answer attests to the real, fundamental reason why these stories are important. Whether or not we agree with all of their messages, these are the stories that survive in our culture and have survived for ages, tying together often conflicting generations through common knowledge and belief. What's more, and particularly relevant now, is that these stories transcend cultural divisions, tying our world together as powerfully as mourning or grief. It is with this in mind that I will be reacting to this global tragedy in the only way I know how, by strengthening the bond with my fellow humans most affected by this tragedy and exploring the culture so hard hit by this disaster. In the coming days, weeks, and maybe even months, I'll be seeking out whatever recorded examples I can find of Haiti's rich folkloric tradition, through the internet and whatever books I can find. This will be an intermittent sub-project whose threads will weave together with everything else I seek to do in this blog, so please be on the lookout in future entries as I compile and read through my sources in order to integrate them with the rest of my materials. I urge you as well to reach out to those around you whose lives have been touched by the tragedy, in any way you see fit. Go with your heart and you will find the human soul that links us all. Thank you for reading, and please be safe.
Showing posts with label Japanese. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Japanese. Show all posts
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
The Very Prince of Badger Tea-Kettles
The story I read today, about a Tanuki that takes the form of a tea-kettle and befriends a poor merchant, is really one of the best stories out there. It's whimsical and funny and magical and comes with a neat little moral about treating people with respect and dignity (at least that's how I see it). I didn't really find a definitive version to match mine, but it seems to be a pretty well-known story, so look up bunbuku-chagama on your preferred search engine and you should come up with lots of nice things.
At first, when I read it, I thought it was pretty frivolous, but the more I thought about the message I was taking from it, the more I realized that this kind of thing is exactly what teachers at Lemberg spend so much time trying to teach young children. Treat everyone you meet with respect and kindness, and not only will they feel a lot better about it, but you will reap quite tangible rewards! I can't tell you how many screaming matches between three-year-olds are solved when I say something like "now, instead of grabbing the shovel, why don't you try asking for it?" So often people of all ages approach situations with hostility, greed, or fear, when a simple humility and openness would work wonders.
Another interesting social phenomenon that comes into play in this story is assumption. The silly old monks assumed that any weird badger living in their tea kettle was something evil, but the poor merchant made no assumptions and asked the tanuki what he wanted. Discarding assumptions often helps a lot with kids, as they do things all the time that appear to have a certain disagreeable intent behind them, but are often quite innocent or harmless behaviors for the children, who don't understand the appearance of actions modeled for them by adults, older siblings, and media sources. My favorite example of this is when I saw a two-year old boy making gun shapes with his hand and saying "bang bang bang!" or something to that effect. Lord knows where he got that from, but I went ahead and asked him what they were. He said they were shooters. I asked him what they shot. He seemed at a loss at that point (obviously - two-year-olds don't know from bullets) so I volunteered a whimsical answer - marshmallows? He agreed, and we played a game where he shot pretend marshmallows from his fingers and I caught them in my mouth.
The wonderful thing about this is that sometimes older children will even recognize the faults of assumptions! One time at Lemberg, a group of three-year-olds wrote and illustrated a book together. Of course they were guided by teachers, but it was my understanding that they invented the plot all by themselves. In the story, a pair of friends named Bober and Fan went to the playground to play, but they were interrupted by a robot named Zober who would only let one person at a time into the playground. Bober and Fan thought about their options for a while, and eventually decided to ask Zober if he wanted to play with them instead of stopping people from getting into the playground. Zober agreed, and the three played together in harmony, proving that strangers really are just friends you haven't met yet. So please, the next time one of your household appliances becomes a talking badger, ask him if he'd like to join you for lunch. You will surely be pleasantly surprised.
At first, when I read it, I thought it was pretty frivolous, but the more I thought about the message I was taking from it, the more I realized that this kind of thing is exactly what teachers at Lemberg spend so much time trying to teach young children. Treat everyone you meet with respect and kindness, and not only will they feel a lot better about it, but you will reap quite tangible rewards! I can't tell you how many screaming matches between three-year-olds are solved when I say something like "now, instead of grabbing the shovel, why don't you try asking for it?" So often people of all ages approach situations with hostility, greed, or fear, when a simple humility and openness would work wonders.
Another interesting social phenomenon that comes into play in this story is assumption. The silly old monks assumed that any weird badger living in their tea kettle was something evil, but the poor merchant made no assumptions and asked the tanuki what he wanted. Discarding assumptions often helps a lot with kids, as they do things all the time that appear to have a certain disagreeable intent behind them, but are often quite innocent or harmless behaviors for the children, who don't understand the appearance of actions modeled for them by adults, older siblings, and media sources. My favorite example of this is when I saw a two-year old boy making gun shapes with his hand and saying "bang bang bang!" or something to that effect. Lord knows where he got that from, but I went ahead and asked him what they were. He said they were shooters. I asked him what they shot. He seemed at a loss at that point (obviously - two-year-olds don't know from bullets) so I volunteered a whimsical answer - marshmallows? He agreed, and we played a game where he shot pretend marshmallows from his fingers and I caught them in my mouth.
The wonderful thing about this is that sometimes older children will even recognize the faults of assumptions! One time at Lemberg, a group of three-year-olds wrote and illustrated a book together. Of course they were guided by teachers, but it was my understanding that they invented the plot all by themselves. In the story, a pair of friends named Bober and Fan went to the playground to play, but they were interrupted by a robot named Zober who would only let one person at a time into the playground. Bober and Fan thought about their options for a while, and eventually decided to ask Zober if he wanted to play with them instead of stopping people from getting into the playground. Zober agreed, and the three played together in harmony, proving that strangers really are just friends you haven't met yet. So please, the next time one of your household appliances becomes a talking badger, ask him if he'd like to join you for lunch. You will surely be pleasantly surprised.
Monday, January 11, 2010
The Flute
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a web-based version of this story, but I did stumble upon a digitized copy of my source book, so if you're really interested you can read any of the Japanese stories I'm reading here. Something about having a rare story in printed form sitting on my bedside table makes me very happy, but of course I'm always happier to share. In fact, this thought leads me quite fluidly in to the topic I have in mind. You see, I'm a bit of a pack rat, and believe strongly in the emotional resonance of physical objects. I recognize that material belongings are nothing compared to real human interactions, of course, but I also see them as being very palpable mementos of such interactions after they have occurred and especially when those people aren't close to me anymore.
Today's story (yesterday's too - I like it very much and was too tired last night to write about it, so I read it twice) is about the most heartbreaking kind of loss, the loss of a child. Once again, this story features no traditional western happy ending, and I am starting to see that its meaning is all the more palpable for being more realistic. What is most powerful for me is the fact that the bereaved father ends the story with nothing but his memories and a single gift from his child: the eponymous flute. One of my favorite parts of fairy tales is the vivid images they can call forth of people, places, strange events, and simple objects imbued with profound magic. The reason this particular image touches me so is that it is by such tokens that I often recall the people I love the most and who are not with me right now. I have not lost many loved ones to death, thankfully, but I have lost many to physical distance and simply a necessary parting of ways. Unfortunately, such is the nature of my work with children and my habit of forming close friendships with people who are planning on studying abroad. I don't think I would survive their absence from my life, permanent or temporary, without the little tokens of their presence in my daily lives. CDs we listened to together, books they bought me, drawings they made for me, toys found in coat pockets from last winter... the list goes on. My home and my studio are both filled with these objects, and though some people see it as mess or clutter, I can't live without it.
It is with this realization, I think, that my art began to change in a major way earlier this year. Understanding how important physical objects were to me, I came to realize that I was merely collecting, never giving away. Certainly, different people have different ways of remembering their loved ones, but how could I feel truly happy creating artwork that I felt embarrassed or uncomfortable giving freely to other people? Of course, I'll always make some art for myself, but I realized, after taking some good, long looks at the kind of art I was making, that I was making virtually nothing for other people. If my goal as an artist was to communicate, I needed to think much more about the people with whom I wanted to communicate. And, tacky as it may sound, I feel a lot better about my artwork when my mother tells me how much she thinks my grandma would like my drawing than when some visiting art critic likes the narrative in my six-foot painting.
Today's story (yesterday's too - I like it very much and was too tired last night to write about it, so I read it twice) is about the most heartbreaking kind of loss, the loss of a child. Once again, this story features no traditional western happy ending, and I am starting to see that its meaning is all the more palpable for being more realistic. What is most powerful for me is the fact that the bereaved father ends the story with nothing but his memories and a single gift from his child: the eponymous flute. One of my favorite parts of fairy tales is the vivid images they can call forth of people, places, strange events, and simple objects imbued with profound magic. The reason this particular image touches me so is that it is by such tokens that I often recall the people I love the most and who are not with me right now. I have not lost many loved ones to death, thankfully, but I have lost many to physical distance and simply a necessary parting of ways. Unfortunately, such is the nature of my work with children and my habit of forming close friendships with people who are planning on studying abroad. I don't think I would survive their absence from my life, permanent or temporary, without the little tokens of their presence in my daily lives. CDs we listened to together, books they bought me, drawings they made for me, toys found in coat pockets from last winter... the list goes on. My home and my studio are both filled with these objects, and though some people see it as mess or clutter, I can't live without it.
It is with this realization, I think, that my art began to change in a major way earlier this year. Understanding how important physical objects were to me, I came to realize that I was merely collecting, never giving away. Certainly, different people have different ways of remembering their loved ones, but how could I feel truly happy creating artwork that I felt embarrassed or uncomfortable giving freely to other people? Of course, I'll always make some art for myself, but I realized, after taking some good, long looks at the kind of art I was making, that I was making virtually nothing for other people. If my goal as an artist was to communicate, I needed to think much more about the people with whom I wanted to communicate. And, tacky as it may sound, I feel a lot better about my artwork when my mother tells me how much she thinks my grandma would like my drawing than when some visiting art critic likes the narrative in my six-foot painting.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Green Willow
Hello friends. You may have noticed that I didn't post an entry yesterday, even though this is a "daily fairy tale writing project." Hopefully none of you are planning on policing my entry rate, but I should clarify that my intent at this time is to post entries five to seven times per week. I did read a fairy tale yesterday. It was The Good Bargain. I think it is rather stupid and I have nothing to say about it, but please feel free to read it. I will skip a story every nce in a while. That being said, I decided to depart from the Grimms for at least a day and read a story from a book I have, entitled Green Willow and Other Japanese Fairy Tales. It was given to me by my good friend Marissa, and contains a number of nice stories. However, the classification of today's story will force me to reconsider my definition of fairy tale in general, if we are to consider it one. At the very least, it is quite different from the largely German and entirely Western fairy tales I've been examining. In any case, I am very interested in classification and genre, so this will be a fun exercise. Without further ado...
Green Willow
(A note on the versions - in the version I read, the story ends when Tomotada, as a holy man, returns to see the three tree stumps, remembers the song he once sang for his love, and then correcting himself and saying a prayer of mourning. Also, much greater emphasis is placed on Tomotada's failure to complete is master's task. He is explicitly told before leaving not to look any maiden between the eyes. In another difference worth mentioning, Green Willow is explicitly stated as being 15.)
The first difference from the typical Grimm formula that I noticed in this story was that it didn't seem to be a coming-of-age story, as the protagonist is not a particularly young man (presumably, given that he's a samurai - please correct me if this assumption is incorrect). It is also a love story with a male protagonist (not a story about making a living, as most Grimm stories about boys seem to be). Finally, it doesn't have the expected happy ending. This last difference is really the most striking to me. I am willing to quickly accept that there are different values being discussed here, given that it's from a very different culture, but that the very structure of the narrative changes is quite surprising! Now, I feel like I could perceive in one of two ways: either this story doesn't have a happy ending, because such an ending is not necessary for Japanese children's tales, or this story does have a happy ending, it's just not the kind we're used to. We (the western reader) are expecting the "happy ending" to involve Tomotada and Green Willow overcoming her strange enchantment and living a happy life together forever. In the version I found online, this sort of happens, in that the two become new trees and grow together. In the version I read first, Tomotada simply mourns and moves on, remembering sadly the life of carefree love he once lived. Could this be a happy ending? Once again, in the version I read, great emphasis is placed on Tomotada's failure to complete his daimyo's errand, and being led astray, so to speak, by Green Willow. In a sense, his eventual progression to a holy life and his ability to mature past the infatuation of his younger days could be seen as a happy ending. In fact, it could also be seen as a coming of age, just an older age. In fact, it even suggests that this is not a love story, but rather a spiritual enlightenment story.
I wish I could show you the exact text of the version I have, because even in comparing it to what I see online shows some remarkable changes in message. The online version is much closer to the western idea of a happy ending and a traditional love story. I would like to believe that my text version is more accurate to the original tale, but this will clearly take further reading. Time permitting (these Japanese stories are a bit longer than most of Grimms') I will stick with this cultural comparison for a while, or at least try to maintain the theme along with all the others. Thanks for reading!
Green Willow
(A note on the versions - in the version I read, the story ends when Tomotada, as a holy man, returns to see the three tree stumps, remembers the song he once sang for his love, and then correcting himself and saying a prayer of mourning. Also, much greater emphasis is placed on Tomotada's failure to complete is master's task. He is explicitly told before leaving not to look any maiden between the eyes. In another difference worth mentioning, Green Willow is explicitly stated as being 15.)
The first difference from the typical Grimm formula that I noticed in this story was that it didn't seem to be a coming-of-age story, as the protagonist is not a particularly young man (presumably, given that he's a samurai - please correct me if this assumption is incorrect). It is also a love story with a male protagonist (not a story about making a living, as most Grimm stories about boys seem to be). Finally, it doesn't have the expected happy ending. This last difference is really the most striking to me. I am willing to quickly accept that there are different values being discussed here, given that it's from a very different culture, but that the very structure of the narrative changes is quite surprising! Now, I feel like I could perceive in one of two ways: either this story doesn't have a happy ending, because such an ending is not necessary for Japanese children's tales, or this story does have a happy ending, it's just not the kind we're used to. We (the western reader) are expecting the "happy ending" to involve Tomotada and Green Willow overcoming her strange enchantment and living a happy life together forever. In the version I found online, this sort of happens, in that the two become new trees and grow together. In the version I read first, Tomotada simply mourns and moves on, remembering sadly the life of carefree love he once lived. Could this be a happy ending? Once again, in the version I read, great emphasis is placed on Tomotada's failure to complete his daimyo's errand, and being led astray, so to speak, by Green Willow. In a sense, his eventual progression to a holy life and his ability to mature past the infatuation of his younger days could be seen as a happy ending. In fact, it could also be seen as a coming of age, just an older age. In fact, it even suggests that this is not a love story, but rather a spiritual enlightenment story.
I wish I could show you the exact text of the version I have, because even in comparing it to what I see online shows some remarkable changes in message. The online version is much closer to the western idea of a happy ending and a traditional love story. I would like to believe that my text version is more accurate to the original tale, but this will clearly take further reading. Time permitting (these Japanese stories are a bit longer than most of Grimms') I will stick with this cultural comparison for a while, or at least try to maintain the theme along with all the others. Thanks for reading!
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