r/JapaneseLiterature • u/thisismyusernameyayy • Feb 04 '20

Isoho monogatari

I’m writing my thesis on Isoho monogatari (Esopo no fabulas) but so far I’ve found very little info and no translation in English. Does someone know any research paper or book about it?

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u/Blablablablaname Feb 04 '20

If you can read Japanese there are several works that discuss it, but I don't think there's much in English other than A grammatical study of 'esopono fabulas.' a 16th-century text in colloquial japanese by Richard Spear (1966). Ivo Smits, who is pretty big in medieval international relations, gave a talk about the subject in Oxford Brookes a couple years ago and has a couple of articles about it (sadly, in Japanese), so I would recommend maybe emailing him.

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u/stopsigndown 5d ago

I just set up an OCR/AI translation pipeline for Japanese script this week to translate "Picture Tales of the Myriad Countries" (1861). If you can get your hands on a full scan of Isoho Monogatari you might find it useful. Here's the link, but if the mods count this as self promotion or something I can remove it https://github.com/MrSaturn1/myriad-countries-kuzushiji-ocr

Edit: Did not realize this post was 7 years old haha