Front Matter · In the land of the gods : $b some stories of Japan

By Alice M. Bacon

IN THE LAND OF THE GODS. 12mo, $1.50.

JAPANESE GIRLS AND WOMEN. 16mo, $1.25. In Riverside Library for Young People. 16mo, 75 cents.

_Holiday Edition._ With 12 full-page Illustrations in color and 43 outline drawings by Japanese artists. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $4.00.

A JAPANESE INTERIOR. 16mo, $1.25. In Riverside School Library. 16mo, 60 cents, _net_.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. BOSTON AND NEW YORK

IN THE LAND OF THE GODS

SOME STORIES OF JAPAN BY ALICE MABEL BACON

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY MDCCCCV

_Published October 1905_

DEDICATION

TO MY JAPANESE FRIENDS, THROUGH WHOSE EYES I HAVE SEEN, BY WHOSE EARS I HAVE HEARD, WITH WHOSE VOICES I HAVE SPOKEN, THIS VOLUME IS GRATEFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED

A story book should need no introduction, but inasmuch as this one deals with customs, beliefs, and modes of thought as yet unfamiliar to American readers, a few preliminary words of explanation may be an aid to sympathy and comprehension.

Since the great war has begun to show us something of the intensity of Japanese national life, nothing, perhaps, has surprised the Occident more than the spiritual force of the race,--the reverent but certain attitude in which its members stand toward much that is to us unknown, or at best intermittently believed. In no respect do the Japanese as a nation differ more widely from Occidentals than in their actual practical belief in the close relations existing between the visible and the invisible, and in the continuity of this life and the next. The pledge of “loyalty to the Emperor for seven lives” is not a mere hyperbole. It voices the deepest religious feeling of the Japanese soul.

In the hope that somehow, by this effort to render vivid to American minds some of the popular beliefs and superstitions of Japan, I may be able to help my own people to a more sympathetic understanding of our trans-Pacific neighbors, I have written out these stories. Many of them are simply folk-tales, set, for our better comprehension of the conditions, in the every-day atmosphere of Japanese home-life in country or city. One, “The Blue Flame,” is an incident told me as true, and as occurring in the very town in which the narrator lived. Two, “The Favor of Hachiman” and “At the Shrine of Fudō,” while neither folk-tales nor stories told to me, set forth beliefs that to-day actuate the lives of some forty million wide-awake, progressive, and intelligent people.

Three of the stories are devoted to the fox superstition, still found among the peasants and among the lower classes in the cities, but that no longer survives among the educated modern Japanese.

For a fuller understanding of the mysteries touched upon in this volume, the reader is referred to the works of Lafcadio Hearn. His book, “Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation,” is the most complete and sympathetic study yet made of the spiritual side of the nation, and the chapter “Kitsuné,” in volume one of his “Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan,” relates in charming form the various phases of the fox belief.

HOLDERNESS, N. H., August, 1905.