ALL THE FIERCEST DEMONS WEAR TIGER-SKIN TROUSERS
FOREWORD BY PAUL DI FILIPPO
If you ever chance to visit Washington, DC during cherry-blossom time, you will be enjoying an arboreal esthetic experience which conceals many subtextual layers of politics, trade, and cultural exchange. The history of the establishment of those trees, in short, is this: in 1907, William Howard Taft, then Secretary of War under President Roosevelt, visited Japan, accompanied by his wife. Mrs. Taft had already seen to the initial planting of some native decorative cherry trees in the US capital, and was pleased to learn that Yukio Ozaki, the Mayor of Tokyo (or “Tokio,” as it was then charmingly called by Anglophones), now planned to gift the US with 3000 more, as a token of international friendship. After taking time to mature, the trees arrived in 1910, were unfortunately found to be diseased, but were generously replaced by 3000 others from Japan in 1912.
That’s the broad outline of how cherry trees came from Tokyo to Washington. But one thing that this synopsis neglects—an alluring literary angle—is that the whole process was observed, endorsed and perhaps, I daresay, even fostered and facilitated to some extent by the Mayor’s wife, an intriguing person named Yei Theodora Ozaki (1870-1932). Mrs. Ozaki (Ozaki coincidentally happened to be her maiden name as well as the one she acquired by marriage) was a fascinating figure whose first publication, The Japanese Fairy Book (1903), you now hold in your hands. Before we delve into her biography and the charming and thrilling contents of her book, let’s finish the tale of the cherry trees.
Yei Theodora was involved in every step of the gift, and, with her writerly eye, captured one tragicomic moment. Here’s a snippet from a letter that she wrote to Mrs. Taft, as reprinted in the Washington Evening Star for April 11, 1936:
When the secretary of the United States Embassy went to the City Hall and informed my husband of the unforeseen and unfortunate end of the cherry trees, the young man looked very uneasy and grave at having to announce such an untimely end to the first cherry trees. My husband smiled and said:
"Oh, I believe your first President set the example of destroying cherry trees, didn't he?”
There was a laugh and the secretary looked quite relieved!
This wry, evocative, telling anecdote, full of natural human emotions and a surprise twist, perfectly captures some of Yei Theodora’s magnificent writing abilities and narrative inclinations. Her book of fairy tales, myths, and legends consists not of straight translations of original Japanese texts, but rather of retellings, shaped according to her own literary intuitions. So we can discern in these narratives her own predilections and talents, not just the original intent of the anonymous bards.
Exactly how did Yei Theodora, born in England, reach the point of palling around with powerful politicians in the Pacific? It was a highly unusual journey.
Baron Sabur ō Ozaki was one of the first visiting Japanese citizens to chase his intellectual passions in the United Kingdom. He also seems to have chased one of his tutors, an Englishwoman named Bathia Catherine Morrison, for they were married in 1869. Their first daughter was our author, Yei Theodora. Two other girls followed, before the Baron had to return to Japan to attend to the little matter of fulfilling a prearranged marriage to one of his own countrywomen. Bathia and the Baron divorced in 1881, and in 1887, when Yei Theodora would have been still only in her teens, she went to Japan to live with Dad. Some years later, after disagreeing with Pop about the advisability and desirability of her own forced marriage, she struck out on her own. The next few years saw her earning a living as tutor, secretary, and traveling companion to one Mary Fraser. This last-named friend saw in Yei Theodora the makings of a fine writer, and encouraged her to submit her work to various UK magazines. After some success in those venues came the book now under our consideration. Shortly thereafter, she met Mayor Yukio Ozaki, they married, and Yei Theodora became a mother herself. Alas, she lived only until the age of sixty-one. Her final voyage replicated her first one, for although she died in London, her remains were repatriated to Japan.
As a cosmopolitan, biracial, bilingual woman, Yei Theodora must have encountered barriers of prejudice and suspicion in both in the UK and Japan, yet she seems to have plowed straight on, unfazed. Her residency in the mid-to-high strata of society must have smoothed things a bit. Perhaps she also made the most of her exotic heritage. This was, after all, the era of a seductive Orientalism, when a cultural production such as Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado (1885) could enrapture Westerners. The headline-grabbing news of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) would also have helped the subsequent editions of her books.
In any case, by producing her books, Yei Theodora was patently honoring both strains of her ancestry. She was promulgating and disseminating her father’s cultural touchstones of the Far East, while also entertaining and enlightening her mother’s tribe (and Americans too). A win-win situation. And her first book fit neatly into the then-current rage for fairy tales, as exemplified in the work of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books of Many Colors. (Yei Theodora credits Lang in her preface for inspiration.)
What was her methodology in porting over these tales? She explains in her introduction to her second book, Warriors of Old Japan:
In picturesqueness of conception Japanese stories yield the palm to none. And they are rich in quaint expressions and dainty conceits. But they are apt to be written in a style almost too bald. This defect the professional story-teller remedies by colouring his story as he tells it. In the same way I have tried to brighten the rather bare structure of a story, where it seemed to need such treatment, with touches of local colour in order to give emphasis to the narrative, and at the same time make the story more attractive to the foreign reader. Whether I have succeeded or not, the reader must judge for himself. I shall be satisfied if in some small measure I have been able to do for Japanese folk-lore what Andrew Lang has done for folk-lore in general . . .
The result of Yei Theodora’s painstaking and inventive and joyful labors are a set of fables that remain timeless, rewarding to both young and old. The amount of pure entertainment in this collection is huge. Reading these tales today, one feels that one is tapping into some truly ancient sources—but also that one is experiencing the unique interpolative nuances and touches of a bright Edwardian artist. The purity of the archetypes on display is far removed from the products of the commodified fantasy market of today, and yet one can discern certain motifs that have functioned as the seeds of contemporary fantasy. We even get, in “The Stones of Five Colours and the Empress Jokwa,” a scenario of giants and gems that the MCU’s Thanos would envy.
Nearly two-dozen tales are filled with warfare and domesticity, history and legend, humor and tragedy, politics and art, characters low-born and high-born, urban and rural venues, and vibrant personages from the animal, human, and supernatural realms. Yei Theodora’s prose is elegant without being rococo. Her narrative drive is unfaltering, and she always devotes precisely the right amount of lines to characterization and setting. Although the cast is continually changing, one figure repeats across a few stories, and that is Rin Jin, the dragon lord under the sea. A kind of Falstaffian demiurge, he operates like an Oberon as the engine of the occult world
Also to her credit, our author refrains from moralizing or being “educational,” succumbing only once, in “The Story of Urashima Taro, the Fisher Lad,” which concludes thus: “Little children, never be disobedient to those who are wiser than you, for disobedience is the beginning of all the miseries and sorrows of life.” It’s a momentary lapse in a literary world that is otherwise more sophisticated about cause and effect, rewards and punishments.
Yei Theodora does not mollycoddle her audience, and while many of these tales end with a “happily ever after,” an equal number come to a less joyous closure. “But, alas! in this world nothing lasts for ever. Even the moon is not always perfect in shape, but loses its roundness with time, and flowers bloom and then fade. So at last the happiness of this family was broken up by a great sorrow. The good and gentle wife and mother was one day taken ill.”
One of Yei Theodora’s most captivating features is her droll, wry humor. There are overt instances of this, such as when certain trickster figures serve others with a satirical or absurdist comeuppance. But other instances are more organic and subtle.
The horned demons looking up and only seeing a pheasant, laughed and said:
"A wild pheasant, indeed! It is ridiculous to hear such words from a mean thing like you. Wait till you get a blow from one of our iron bars!”
Very angry, indeed, were the devils. They shook their horns and their shocks of red hair fiercely, and rushed to put on tiger skin trousers to make themselves look more terrible. They then brought out great iron bars and ran to where the pheasant perched over their heads and tried to knock him down. The pheasant flew to one side to escape the blow, and then attacked the head of first one and then another demon. He flew round and round them, beating the air with his wings so fiercely and ceaselessly, that the devils began to wonder whether they had to fight one or many more birds.
That scene could have easily constituted one of the lighter moments in a Miyazaki film.
Adult readers aware of Yei Theodora’s own biography will inevitably be tempted to look for hidden touchstones of her personal life. Given the abandonment of her family by the Baron, one might suspect that fathers and husbands would come in for a dig or two. But they generally do not. The roster of happy and devoted couples in these tales is long and unbroken. Perhaps this stems from Yei Theodora merely being faithful to her original material. And yet she made the selection of stories. But in one case, what might be some lingering sadness or disappointment or even anger breaks through. That happens in “The Story of Prince Yamato Take.” Here, the noble and brave warrior reveals one dreadful flaw.
In these dangers and adventures he had been followed by his faithful loving wife the Princess Ototachibana. For his sake she counted the weariness of the long journeys and the dangers of war as nothing, and her love for her warrior husband was so great that she felt well repaid for all her wanderings if she could but hand him his sword when he sallied forth to battle, or minister to his wants when he returned weary to the camp.
But the heart of the Prince was full of war and conquest and he cared little for the faithful Ototachibana. From long exposure in travelling, and from care and grief at her lord's coldness to her, her beauty had faded, and her ivory skin was burnt brown by the sun, and the Prince told her one day that her place was in the palace behind the screens at home and not with him upon the warpath. But in spite of rebuffs and indifference on her husband's part, Ototachibana could not find it in her heart to leave him. But perhaps it would have been better for her if she had done so, for on the way to Idzu, when they came to Owari, her heart was well nigh broken.
Here dwelt in a palace shaded by pine-trees and approached by imposing gates, the Princess Miyadzu, beautiful as the cherry blossom in the blushing dawn of a spring morning . . .
Yamato Take takes up with the Princess, disdaining his wife, and yet she remains loyal, ultimately sacrificing herself so that her husband may live. Yamato Take’s only redemptive move comes too late, when he ultimately acknowledges his sins, even though his wife is beyond his palliation or remorse.
In “The Happy Hunter and the Skilful Fisher,” Rin Jin the Dragon King greets his human guest with this delightful imperative: “Condescend to remember us for ever!” Thanks to the dedication, skills, insights, ambition, and general zest for living deployed by Yei Theodora Ozaki, Rin Jin’s urgings stand a good chance of being honored by generation after generation of new readers.