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Thursday, September 06, 2018

The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (1000 AD) by Anon


Book Review
The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (1000 AD)
 by Anon

 Replaces: 282. Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus (May 2015 Review)

  The major difference between the 282 books that were replaced between the first and second edition of the 1001 Books list is the addition of more books by non-English authors and the removal of authors from England, greater Britain and America.  It seems that another potential change is that fewer female authors are included in the second edition, since that was one area- specifically the inclusion of white, English language female authors in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries- where the first edition of the 1001 Books did make an effort to diversify from the traditional white-male centric literary canon.

   The very first switch is the introduction of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, a 10th century example of the "Japanese fictional prose narrative" that functions as a parallel tradition of literary fiction. In fact, the first two replacements, this book and the overwhelming Tales of Genji (which might actually be the first novel in the world) are Japanese leading to the question of how they were excluded from the first edition. Aesop's Fables, on the other hand, was an uninspired choice- just a compilation of short fables that reads nothing like the modern novel.

   Similar to Aesop's Fables, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter belongs to the world of "folk-tales" with mythical and quasi-science fictional elements. The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter remains obscure in the west- the only print copy owned by the Los Angeles Public Library is an art-book edition published in 1998. 

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