Thankyou for this ARC.

I enjoyed this, it was interesting to learn a bit more about Japanese Folklore as it isn't an area of folklore i have really looked into before. Each story is a different vibe, from Ghosts to Love and I had no idea where it would end up next.

A fascinating collecting of tales - perfect for anyone interested in Japanese culture. The pacing was good and I really liked the narrator.

I really enjoyed the tales and folklore of Japan. I did listen to it with a quicker pace as I found the narrator a bit slow In a normal speed. I listen to most audiobooks with a quicker speed. I enjoyed hearing all the different tales and found it great to listen to when relaxing after work.

This audio title is a collection of some 50 plus stories originally published around 1908 by the English traveller and author, Richard Gordon Smith. He spent some years in Japan and died there. I loved the cover; it’s vibrant enticing and really sells the title. The narrator is a well known actor who also does audiobooks and he did a good job of delivering these stories.

Now to the nitty gritty. These really don’t work for me. Most are incredibly dull and I had little sense of mystery or excitement. I feel that as an outsider, Smith has created his version of some of the tales and there are examples of colonial and racist attitudes which would have been part of him, rather than the Japanese culture. I assume they were originally written in English, but the language is outdated and stilted and I had little pleasure listening to them. I’m left with a sense that these are an incohesive hotch potch of tales and I haven’t gained much insight into Japanese folklore or culture. I was disappointed.

Format Review 🎧 3/5
The narrator’s delivery was good, which is especially admirable given what he had to work with. I listened to it on 1.25x speed because the speech was slow in places but overall, the narrator did his best with these stories. I probably wouldn’t have finished this if it wasn’t in the audiobook format.

Story Review 📖 1/5
First off, this needed much, much stronger editing. Simply put, it’s not well written. The writing, grammar, sentence structure, and language is very poor: we have incredibly stilted and unrealistic dialogue and very awkward, or just plain wrong, language (some examples to illustrate: “revenge my death” should be “avenge”, “talk the language” should be “speak”, “he aroused his wife” should be “roused”). There’s a noticeable overuse of the word “moreover”. It felt archaic with a jarringly present author. The book is a product of its time and I didn’t appreciate the racist and misogynist commentary from the English author. It wouldn’t detriment any of the stories to remove the racism and misogyny. I can’t see this landing positively with a 2025 readership.

There were some interesting stories; but most are forgettable and underwhelming, blending together boringly. It doesn’t help that so many of the similar ones are grouped together (like all the fire-themed ones at the start and the tree-themed toward the end). I definitely preferred the ghostly stories but these lacked distinction too. I got really sick of the “beautiful 16/17 year old daughters” with insta-love. As I was listening, I wanted to verify/fact-check a lot of the history and legend. I don’t think samurai were committing seppuku and regular folks were killing themselves over the slightest little thing like they did in this book. Also, it’s deemed Japanese folklore but doesn’t have the tale of maneki neko?!

My pet theory is that this English dude was wandering around Japan asking for stories so he could write/sell it in England and many of the stories are just folks messing with him.

I was awfully disappointed in this. It was a beautiful opportunity to condense, tidy-up, streamline, and curate a cool collection of folktales but it feels more like someone found a manuscript, glanced at it and was like “that’ll do”. 🤷‍♀️