Reading Notes: Japanese Mythology Part A

Reading Notes

Japanese Mythology Part A

Last week, I wanted to get into reading some of the Japanese Fairytale stories that the Un-Textbook had to offer. This week, I tried to get into the root of the stories I wanted to tell in this class, and that's the Japanese Mythology story unit. The goal from the reading was to get a better idea of how the Japanese myth characters were born and utilized in storytelling, as well as getting more idea of the flow of these stories. Getting into the first half of the reading, it took me a few read-throughs to get the flow down to comprehend the story. There was a mix of different story elements, including poetry, dialogue, and third-person omniscient perspective.  The mixing of these methods led to me being confused, especially in the beginning because I didn't notice it until the sentence structure thoroughly changed up. I guess I just glazed over Professor Gibb's note, in the beginning, to read aloud due to the poetry. She is not kidding when she recommends to read it out loud. I also suggest you do so! It just sounds better to hear it when you read over just going through it in your head. I wished this section had an audiobook attached so that my first experience with the story was more natural to process. The dialogue took me by surprise because it was very similar to the Greek Mythology writings. I guess in my head they had different dialects and different ways to address the characters aside from "thy" and "thou" and such. They used terms in that fashion so heavily that it got harder to read if it wasn't being read out loud. It made the reading feel condensed and complicated. The third-person view of the story was my favorite part by far. Those parts of the story were the most exciting for me, which made me sad since I usually live for the dialogue. The pavement of the story was best done for me when looking at that method over the other two.

Image: Untold Stories of Japanese Mythology (Wikimedia Common)
Bibliography: Romance of Old Japan, Part I: Mythology and Legend by E. W. Champney and F. C (Un-Textbook)