Years ago in a friend’s book about Japan, I read how in Tokyo before the war there were about one thousand storytelling theatres. People on the way home from work would pay a quarter to sit in a theater for about thirty minutes listening to a wide variety of traditional and comic tales. This of course was in the era before television.
For some reason this little snippet of information confirmed my sense that the Japanese people and their civilization make exceptionally human human beings. I would love to spend a year in a Japanese village one day, drinking sake and writing haiku.
Elsewhere in the same book was a chapter on the snowiest village in the world. There is so much snow, about ten meters or so, that in the dead of winter you can see only the rooftops of each house. The villagers fashion tunnels between each others houses, basically living underground several months a year. They probably regale each other with stories around the fire, night after night, during the long, dark winter.
Trudging home in the snow
Each crunch under foot
Telling the tale of our heartbreak
Contemporary ‘Rakugo’ storytelling in English
Another in Japanese (still picture above)
*Tanka: combination of haiku and short story
Lovely.
Storytelling is the oldest profession and distinctly human. All of life can be found in a group of friends, sitting around a campfire...