Tales of Times Now Past
Over a thousand tales arranged from India through China to Japan, each opening with the words now it is long ago: a thief sheltering in the Rashōmon gate who finds an old woman pulling hair from the corpses stored there, a travelling couple and a bandit in a grove, monks tested by demons, provincial officials outfoxed. The compiler sets Buddhist miracle beside bawdy anecdote without ranking them, in a plain classical Japanese untouched by court taste. It is the great reservoir of medieval Japanese narrative, and the collection Akutagawa mined for his modern stories.
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Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
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Closest analogues
- 51% · 11 shared
- 51% · 10 shared
- 51% · 10 shared
- 48% · 10 shared
- 48% · 10 shared
- 46% · 10 shared