Remark:
Fr. Francis Mathy was good enough to order this for me after we found out in our conversation with Satoru Obara, S.J., that this facsimile was still in print. Obara reports on this booklet in his little monograph, Companions of Jesus in the Kirishitan Era in Japan (1994), a copy of which he was good enough to give me. There is also an article on it, Aesop's Arrival in Japan in the 1590's by Yuichi Midzunoe, in Peter Milward's The Mutual Encounter of East and West, 1492-1992 (1992), a copy of which Peter was kind enough to give me. This book of Aesop's fables was the first translation of European literature into Japanese. It includes an abridged life of Aesop and some seventy fables. It exists bound with two other works in a single copy in the British Library (note the stamp on 142). The other stories are The Heike Story and A Collection of Golden Words. My understanding is that the Aesop booklet was meant as much to help Catholic missionaries learn the language as it was to give them a small arsenal of not-immediately-Christian stories to use in their first contacts with Japanese people. Thus the script is Western, and there is a long vocabulary on 101-142 after a short T of C for the fables (97-100) and before four pages of contemporary notes. This was one of the earliest books printed on the press that the Jesuits brought to the Far East. Aesop appears here at a critical moment in the encounter of East and West. From this little start, the fables endured with the Japanese people much longer than the Jesuits were allowed to!
