CHAMBERLAIN, [Basil Hall] Aino Fairy Tales 1 & 2: The Hunter in Fairy Land & The Bird’s Party

8vo., 2 vols; decorative crepe paper wraps, decorated in full colour and tied with string; the first cover showing bows, arrows, quivers, pots and patterns belonging to the Aino people; the second showing birds feasting; and the house of an Aino couple (who told Chamberlain the story) printed to the lower; pp. [xviii] & [x] including covers; lettered and decorated throughout in full colour with illustrations, borders, printed and typographic text in both English and Japanese scripts; the preface to Vol I on extremely thin tissue paper; covers a little worn and the Japanese double-leaf folding (fukuro-toji) split in places; the binding string a little loose; some light creasing in places; Vol II with a damp stain affecting the internal pages, with no loss of text or colour; very good copies of seldom-found ephemeral works. 

Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935) was a British academic and Japanologist who was one of the earliest translators of haiku into English. Born in England in 1850, he set sail for Japan in 1873, and upon landing he was employed first by the Japanese Government, before he began to teach at the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy in Tokyo from 1874 to 1882. Later, he became professor of Japanese at Tokyo Imperial University, beginning in 1886. 

Chamberlain is perhaps best known today for his beautiful translations of Japanese folk tales into English. The Japanese Fairy Tale Series was a run of an intended 23 classic stories which included among them such tales as The Silly Jelly-Fish, Urashima, The Serpent with Eight Heads, and My Lord Bag-o'-Rice. These were published by Kobunsha in Tokyo towards the end of the 19th century, and the publisher employed a series of talented English writers residing in Japan to complete the translations. Beautifully arranged and printed, they included woodblock prints based on those of the Meiji period and were bought chiefly as gifts by foreign travellers or by those wishing to learn about Japanese culture. 

Chamberlain also issued a very limited series of Aino Folk-Tales, which appeared in a run of just 3 books; The Hunter in Fairy-Land, The Birds' Party and The Man who Lost his Wife. Intended as a supplement to the fairy tale series, Chamberlain gathered indigenous oral traditions from the Ainu people of Hokkaido for the content, and they later appeared together in a dedicated 1888 collection for the Folk-lore Society. The first story follows a hunter as he searches for a bear in the snowy mountains. Following it into a cave, he reappears in fairy land, where he eats some of the fruits and is transformed into a snake. When a fairy appears to him in a dream, she tells him that the only way he can escape his plight is to fling himself from the top of a very tall pine tree. After he becomes a man again, he discovers that the bear was actually a fairy luring him to the mystical land to marry him. The second story is much shorter, and is a moral tale about two pigeons who decide to host a dinner party - but because they do not invite everyone, a jealous crow drops a large stone on them from above and the feast is ruined. The last two pages inform the reader that the story was subsequently set to music by a celebrated Japanese composer, and shows a coloured woodcut beneath representing the performance. 

Exceedingly scarce on the open market. 

SKU: 1800219