Ancient Tales and Folklore of Japan

First published in 1908, "Ancient Tales and Folklore of Japan" is a collection by Richard Gordon Smith, a British adventurer, naturalist, and yachtsman who lived in Japan in the early twentieth century and gathered folk stories directly from local sources during his time there, rather than working solely from earlier translated texts. Open Library catalogs the work under folklore, mythology, and legends of Japan. The collection sits alongside the roughly contemporaneous work of Mitford and Hearn as part of a wave of Edwardian-era British writers who lived in Japan and worked to record its oral folk tradition in English before industrialization and modernization reshaped rural storytelling culture. Smith's book is distinguished from the more literary retellings of Hearn by its more direct, field-collected character, reflecting his personal fieldwork and travel through Japan during the period. It remains a primary English-language source consulted by later folklorists studying how regional Japanese tales were first transmitted to Western audiences.