An early example of a picture book of Grimm's Fairy Tales. This edition
introduced "Wolf and the Seven Little Kids" to Japan for the
first time.
The publisher, Kôbun-Sha, was famous for its crepe-paper books for overseas readers, but this edition is in the style of red books (aka-hon) in the Edo period. Kure, the translator, was a well-known scholar of statistics. (Why he came to translate this book for children is unknown.) As some part of the text is different from Grimm Brothers story, Kure probably translated it from an English edition, not from the original German.
While Ookami, the same story by Ueda Kazutoshi published two years later, shows the pictures of goats wearing kimono, those of Yatsu Yagi are drawn in Western style clothing. It has two flap-ups: one is a door, which the kids hide behind, the other is the belly of the wolf containing the kids. This technique to entertain young readers was used in aka-hon in the Edo period, too. |
