"Strong, strong and blind, / Transcending kind-- / Love more strange than death / Or breath."

Starting your story of "The Moon Maiden" with "There was an old bamboo cutter called Také Tori" does not give me confidence in your translation skills: taketori means "bamboo cut(ter)." Which is a shame, as aside from the occasional lapse such as that, Grace James's Japanese Fairy Tales is otherwise well-told, in graceful English prose that does not much mangle the spirit of stories that I'm familiar with -- some stories are from Kojiki and others from Noh plays -- though I can't speak to the details as I don't know what texts/traditions she used.* In particular, she keeps the sometimes startling narrative shapes that do not match what one expects from Western fairy tales: there's an encounter with something supernatural, but then the human goes home with no consequences. Some of the oddities of language are understandable, such as the pre-Hepburn romanizations of Yedo and Kioto (for Edo and Kyoto) and inconsistently treated honorifics. But still, "Také Tori" as a name?

Gutenberg's edition (linked above) is undated, but old book dealers seem to think the first edition, Green Willow and Other Japanese Fairy Tales, is from 1912 -- calibrate your orientalization goggles accordingly.

* Speaking of which, does anyone have an idea of where "Flower of Peony" is from? I'm interested in particular in the original form of the songs, and where those rhymes come from.

---L.