Folktales from Around the World: Asia

For our Co-op last semester, we were learning about the seven continents and the students are giving presentations of their own choosing. My son decided to focus on folktales from each continent and explore story telling. For Asia he chose Monkey: A Trickster Tale from India. For our class we enjoyed a tale featuring tiny samurai from Tuck-me-in tales: bedtime stories from around the world.

ASIA
Monkey: A Trickster Tale from India by Gerald McDermott
The monkey and the crocodile : a Jataka tale from India by Paul Galdone. Tells the same tale as Gerald McDermott; both are good renditions with the McDermott book being slightly shorter.

Japanese Fairy-Tales by Yei Theodora Ozaki is available online for free from Project Gutenberg.

Omusumi Kororin: Follow this link for a script of a traditional Japanese tale about a man who finds his way into the world of mice, where he is rewarded for being kind. This tale parallels the structure of the European fairytale "Diamonds and Toads" where a good person is rewarded and then a bad person attempts to get the reward but fails. Watch it on youtube here.

No Dinner! : The Story of the Old Woman and the Pumpkin by Jessica Souhami. An Indian/Asian folktale of an old woman who tricks wolf, bear, and tiger out of eating her.

The dragon's tale: and other animal fables of the Chinese zodiac by Demi. Each tale is a paragraph or two on its own page, told in a straight-forward manner.

Tikki Tikki Tembo / retold by Arlene Mosel. Illustrated by Blair Lent. A funny Chinese legend tells why children have short names; when two boys fall down the well, the boy with the longer name must wait longer to be rescued. The children laughed each time I had to read the silly long name in the book.

Tanuki's gift : a Japanese tale  by Tim Myers ; pictures by R.G. Roth. An adorable tale where a priest befriends a badger, then asks the badger for money to pay his way into heaven -- instead, the priest learns that it is the badger's friendship that actually matters to him the most.

The hunter : a Chinese folktale retold by Mary Casanova ; illustrations by Ed Young. A hunter earns the ability to understand animals, under threat that he can never give away the secret. In order to save his village from a flood, he chooses to give away the secret and allow himself to be turned to stone. The villagers are saved but regret making him explain himself.

The great race: an Indonesian trickster tale by Author: Scott, Nathan Kumar, is a little bit like the tortoise and the hare, with a trickster twist at the end.

 The gift of the Crocodile: a Cinderella story by Judy Sierra  (Author), Reynold Ruffins (Illustrator). A Cinderella tale from the spice islands (Columbus' original destination). This tale also shares aspects of the "Diamonds and Toads" motif where the good sister is rewarded (with a nice clothes) and the bad sister is punished when she tries to copy her (with leech-filled clothing). This was a favorite of all my kids and led us to learn about mangrove forests.

I hope you like Cinderella, because there are a few dozen more:
The Golden Sandal: a Middle East Cinderella
The Korean Cinderella
Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story From China

Filipino Popular Tales 1921, available from project gutenberg. Short and simply told tales with character.

Indian Fairytales by Joseph Jacob, 1892, available online from project gutenberg. The language is a bit stilted or "classic" and assumes a bit of knowledge of Buddism, but the stories are otherwise short and straightforward.

Note that The Jungle Book is set is the Indian jungle.

The original Arabian Nights Entertainment by Andrew Lang can be found online on the gutenberg project.

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