Gleanings from the Odd Book Bookshelf: No. 1, Japanese Fairy Tales by Yei Theodora Ozaki

Although trained in the laws of librarianship, I find I have never ordered my library according to any rules, even those of the thumb. Binding, colour, and author tend to guide my eye and hand as I arrange books on the shelf; more aesthetics than bibliographics (if I may coin a word use). So my "Odd Book Bookshelf" is rather imaginary for the books are found on various shelves in different locations. Perhaps they harbour desires of shelf-hood and my initiating this series is at their silent beckoning, such is the mysterious nature of the book.

The book in question, Japanese Fairy Tales compiled by Yei Theodora Ozaki (New York: A. L. Burt Company) is a reprint copy likely from the 1920s. It is not a valuable book, nor is it hard to find especially with the internet horn of plenty. The binding of black cloth with orange/red titles is likely from the late 1920s or early 1930s, and it is a style which seems to have been in fashion during this period, books by such authors as Rafael Sabatini, Knut Hamsun, and many others were published with similar bindings. It is the binding style that made me arrange such books together on a shelf, the black bindings and orange/red titles forming an aesthetic continuity even though the actual texts vary significantly. A copy of Scaramouche sitting beside a reprint copy of Brave New World may seem odd but for the binding style.

The book was first published under the Andrew Lang inspired title, The Japanese Fairy Book in 1903 by Archibald Constable & Co. in London, and by E. P. Dutton in New York. It included four colour plates and 62 black and white illustrations in the text. Constable issued a second impression in 1904, a third impression in 1906, a fourth impression in 1908, and a New Edition in 1922, dropping the four colour plates and introducing colour illustrated endpapers by Take Sato.

The copy I have, the A. L. Burt reprint, does not have the colour plates and provides only a selection of the illustrations. This publisher began business in the early 1880s in New York and began to print cheap editions of the classics and eventually came out with "Burt's Home Library" which was popular. (The Discourses of Epictetus was a title in this series and it that makes me think of a favourite story by Stephen Leacock, where a bookstore owner, a Mr. Sellyer would direct his scholarly time-wasting browsers to the back of the shop to peruse the cheap reprints of classics, while he pushed the most recent publications of perhaps dubious value on the unsuspecting public.) In the early years of the last century, A. L. Burt competed with the rival Grosset & Dunlop for the rights to reprint works, mainly fiction, and were successful in the areas of popular fiction and children's books; such authors as Henty, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Conan Doyle, and Edgar Wallace were issued by them. In the 1930s, A. L. Burt was bought by Blue Ribbon Books, a company who also specialized in cheap reprints. (Blue Ribbon Books began using the term "pop up" for their movable books, and it is a term which has certainly outlived their background story.)

The story of Yei Theodora Ozaki (1870-19--) is an interesting one. She was an independent, strong young woman who chose her own path and found her way through literature and teaching. The basic outlines of her life would provide the structure for an interesting movie.

Ozaki Saburo (1842-1918), a junior diplomat of the Meiji period, was in London in 1868 to learn the English language and customs and he boarded with William Mason Morrison (1819-1885) a scholar and private tutor. Ozaki Saburo became close to Morrison's daughter, Bathia Catherine and they were married in 1869. She gave birth to three daughters, Yei Theodora in 1870, Masako Maude in 1872, and Kimiko Florence in 1873. Their father returned to Japan in 1873 leaving his wife and daughters in London. Bathia never visited Japan and she was later divorced in 1881. At the age of 16, Yei went to Japan to stay with her father now a high ranking politician. While there, she grew to know Mrs. Hugh Fraser, the wife of the British Envoy to Tokyo.

Seeing that Yei did not want to participate in an arranged marriage, Mrs. Fraser suggested she come and live with them as her companion and secretary to which Yei accepted. When the Frasers travelled to Italy, Yei accompanied them and while there, she was introduced to Mrs. Fraser's (née Mary Crawford) famous brother the writer Francis Marion Crawford who hired her to catalogue his substantial library. She was like an elder sister or young aunt to the writer's daughters, telling them many of the Japanese fairy stories found in her first book. Her dedication to this book is to Eleanor Marion-Crawford, the daughter who would inherit her father's modest palace in Sorrento. Eleanor's sister, Clare, according to one source, went on to be a nun and she served her order in Japan where she is buried.

When she returned to live and teach in Japan, she began receiving the mail of the rather handsome dashing Yukio Ozaki (1858-1954) a prominent individual who happened to be the Mayor of Tokyo. When they finally met, a deep friendship developed and they were married in 1904. In the year 1912, Yukio Ozaki, as Mayor of Tokyo, organized a gift of 3,000 blossoming cherry trees for Washington D.C., cherry trees that continue to be celebrated to this day. The spring of 2012 will be the 100th anniversary of this gift and there will be special celebrations in Washington during the National Cherry Blossom Festival from March 20th to April 27th, 2012.


Books by Yei Theodora Ozaki:

The Japanese Fairy Book, 1903.
Buddha's Crystal and other Fairy Stories, 1908.
Warriors of Old Japan, 1909.
Romances of Old Japan, 1919. (as Madame Yukio Ozaki)

The writings of Yukio Ozaki were collected in 12 volumes, Works, Ozaki Gakudo Zenshu (Tokyo: Koronsha, 1955). A recent English edition of his autobiography was published by Princeton in 2001, The Autobiography of Ozaki Yukio: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in Japan.

Lafcadio Hearn and the Milky Way: The Tanabata Festival

June 27th was the 160th anniversary of Lafcadio Hearn's birth, and I have been thinking about his life and work over the last days. He was born on the then British-ruled Ionian Island of Lefkcada in 1850 of a Greek mother and an Anglo-Irish father, and abandoned essentially by both at the age of seven and overseen by a paternal Great Aunt, a Mrs. Brenane, in Wales. He never did see his younger brother or his parents ever again. He was sent to a Jesuit school in Northern France, and also to a Catholic school in Durham where he lost the sight of an eye in a school-yard game gone awry. At the age of 16, he left this school and made his way to London where for a number of obscure years he managed to survive poverty and isolation, years so painful to memory that he never did elaborate on them. At age 19 he made his way to New York, one of many penniless emigrants, and though a wanderer in the United States and in the Caribbean, he did finally discover a place where he felt at home, Japan. [I have written briefly about how he first came to visit the country here.]

He died there in September 1904 with a fine reputation as a teacher and writer. The first book published posthumously was his The Milky Way and Other Studies and Stories (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1905). It was published in October of 1905, and is made up of essays and stories, many of them having been published in the Atlantic Monthly over the last year. The title story first saw print in that periodical in August 1905 (vol. 96, p. 238) and concerned the subject of the Japanese festival of Tanabata.

The seventh day of the seventh month is the Tanabata Festival, and although in Japan it is now the wee hours of the following day, and many Japanese are perhaps dreaming of the previous day and evening festivities, I thought I would make a link to the essay by Lafcadio Hearn. It is an excellent essay with a good selection of poetry and he ends it with his characteristic style of writing and a mild example of his idiosyncratic use of punctuation which was so often a challenge to his editors--and their typesetters.


The Romance of the Milky Way by Lafcadio Hearn.

A Stray Impressionist Finds his Home

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) had travelled and wandered far in his life, and though he thought the tropics would keep him, it was in the far east that he discovered home. In the fall of 1889, he was unhappy and staying in New York when an art editor at Harper's suggested he write a book on Japan. While Hearn worked on his book proposal for Harper's, the art editor travelled to Montreal to talk with Sir William Van Horne to see if he could provide passage across Canada for Hearn and an artist. Sir William agreed and offered $250 upon Hearn's arrival in Montreal. The requirement was for Lafcadio Hearn to write an article about the trip across Canada on one of Sir William's Canadian Pacific Railway trains.

On March 8th, 1890, Hearn and C. D. Weldon, the artist, left New York by train and arrived in Montreal greeted by the cold and ice:

Ice, many inches thick, sheets the pavements; and lines of sleighs, instead of lines of hacks, wait before the station for passengers. No wheeled vehicles are visible,--except one hotel omnibus: only sleighs are passing. They have for me quite an unfamiliar picturesqueness.

Hearn's glimpse of Montreal was unfortunately short. It would have been interesting to read of his impressions from a longer stay in Montreal, but he did leave a short description:

The city is very solid and very gray--a limestone city largely: comfortable, conservative looking. Nothing that strikes the eyes has a foreign aspect, --except a few old French houses recalling memories of New Orleans: the newer and larger buildings awake remembrances of New York and Philadelphia in their less modern quarters.

These excerpts are from the "required" article published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1890; in the article Hearn also reflects on the nature of modern travel. He sees that a circuit of the world was possible, according to his calculations, in 35 days and six hours. He outlines the various stages and durations. It was on his mind. He was fondly attracted to Elizabeth Bisland, a fellow journalist, who had left New York on a race to be the first to circumnavigate the world in the shortest time. Bisland was playing catch-up with Nellie Bly who had already left on her trip around the world. It was the attempt of the owner of the Cosmopolitan Magazine's to compete with Bly and The World. Nellie Bly won.

Hearn's article continues with wonderful descriptions of Canadian scenery for many pages; just what Sir William Van Horne was looking for I am sure. They arrived at Vancouver where they boarded the Abysinnia which departed on March 17th.

It was on this day, the 4th of April, 1890, when Lafcadio Hearn first glimpsed Japan, the country that this "civilized nomad" could at last call home:

Then with a delicious shock of surprise I see something for which I had been looking, --far exceeding all anticipation --but so ghostly, so dream white against the morning blue, that I did not observe it at the first glance: an exquisite snowy cone towering above all other visible things--Fujiyama! Its base, the same tint as the distances, I cannot see--only the perfect crown, seeming to hang in the sky like a delicate film,--a phantom.