From "the tortoise and the hare" to "the boy who cried 'wolf'," no cultural import from the West has taken hold in Japan as strongly as has Aesop's Fables. Japanese readers have consistently turned to the Fables ever since their first appearance in print over 400 years ago. We can cite several reasons behind this enduring popularity-their manageable brevity, their morally upright but not overtly religious message, and the use of familiar animals and identifiable stock characters-but one important element easy to overlook today is the characterization of the author/protagonist Aesop himself.
While Aesop's Fables today, whether in Japan or elsewhere, includes only the fables proper, medieval European printed editions featured an extensive "Life of Aesop" that, in the earliest Japanese editions, takes up the first third of the collection. Late 15th-century European editions, beginning with Heinrich Steinhöwel's Latin/German translations, present Aesop-related stories replete with graphic woodcut illustrations. 16th- and 17th-century Jesuit missionaries and their Japanese collaborators based their translations on such editions, and, in the process, transformed the Phrygian slave and royal advisor Aesop into an itinerant lay Buddhist priest and otogishû storyteller. This presentation examines four different editions of the Fables that appeared in Japan between 1593 and 1844, and analyzes both the characterizations of Aesop and the reception of the fables themselves in early modern Japan.