Through the Water Curtain and other Tales from Around the World Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  INTRODUCTION

  The Boy Who Drew Cats

  Kotura, Lord of the Winds

  Through the Water Curtain

  The Areca Tree

  The Maid of the Copper Mountain

  The Tale of the Firebird

  Bluebeard

  The Six Swans

  Golden Foot

  The Story of One Who Set Out to Study Fear

  The Frog Princess

  The One-Handed Murderer

  The Girl Who Gave a Knight a Kiss Out of Necessity

  STORY SOURCES

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  I didn’t like fairy tales when I was a child. No. I had a scratched LP (yes, that’s how old I am) that contained several tales of the Brothers Grimm. I definitely recall Cinderella. Then there was the terrifying Goose Maid, with the chopped-off talking head of Falada, the faithful horse (utterly traumatizing), King Thrushbeard, The Frog Prince, Hansel and Gretel, The Wolf and the Seven Goatlings… I grew up in Germany, so the narrator read the original tales—abbreviated, I am sure, but not censored or modified to make them more digestible for children. I therefore knew the darker versions by heart before I encountered the interpretations of Walt Disney or the light-hearted Czech movie adaptations I learnt to love.

  All that darkness was of course deeply troubling, but as the tales were both bewildering and strangely unforgettable, I listened to that LP almost every night in my bed, over and over again. It taught me how strange an enchantment fairy tales can cast even though the characters stay rather abstract and the plot takes the wildest and often very abrupt twists and turns. Fairy tales break all the rules of a good story and yet they find such powerful images for the deepest human emotions and fears that we sense deep layers of meaning in a poisonous apple or the gruelling setting of a gingerbread house, and more truth than a thousand words would grant.

  Of course, that’s an explanation I came up with much later for the lure of the scratchy LP. As a child I didn’t ask myself what cast the spell. We accept the rules of enchanted lands much more easily when we are young.

  Apart from the Grimm’s LP, I also remember a book of Hans Christian Andersen’s Tales bound in blue linen, a pale green volume of animal tales that I still own. In some of those stories I felt more at home than in The Grimm’s Tales, maybe because their tone was more familiar and less distant in time. I didn’t know yet about the difference between folk tales passed on by nameless storytellers over the ages and fairy tales created by modern authors like H.C. Andersen, Oscar Wilde or Rudyard Kipling (it doesn’t get much better than Just So Stories).

  Nevertheless. The dark tales the Grimms had collected, though so much older than The Ugly Duckling or The Happy Prince, stayed with me, along with their mysterious and powerful imagery, their archetypes and the magic of rose-covered castles and shoes filled with blood… which sometimes included a cut-off toe. But I probably still would’ve shaken my head in disbelief at the age of thirty if someone had told me that one day I’d own quite a collection of fairy-tale books, and I probably would’ve accepted any bet that I’d never make them a vital part of my own writing. Even when I was reading and rereading tales from all over the world for this anthology, I often felt again what I felt as my six-year-old self: that I don’t really like fairy tales.

  Oh, all those helpless princesses and scheming old women, all those child-eating witches and stepmothers! Does any literary mirror reflect more unflinchingly, how cruelly women are judged and vilified when they rebel against the parts men want them to play? All over the world, fairy tales describe the golden cages and the punishment for the women who try to escape them. Of course, in most cases the only hope for the heroine is the timely appearance of the prince. Folk and fairy tales tend to be quite reactionary. They don’t even try to hide their purpose of confirming and preserving the values of patriarchal societies, with their strict hierarchies anchored by property and armed violence. But from time to time one comes across a tale with a slightly more rebellious message, and each time I discover one of those I wonder whether many others were forgotten exactly because they don’t reaffirm the traditional values that even the liberal Grimms believed in.

  Sometimes these rebellious tales may have their origin in older times, when women often inherited power because the men tended to get themselves killed quite young. Others have such powerful heroines that I suspect them to be the echoes of long-forgotten goddesses—or of a very rebellious witch. Even some familiar tales, like Little Red Riding Hood, have older versions with far less helpless heroines. And Sleeping Beauty was not always woken with just a kiss.

  What about the happy ending? The older tales often don’t have one, but even the Grimms did not just collect the tales they heard from oral storytellers. They censored and changed them according to their own values, which were the ideals of the rising middle class in the nineteenth century. The intentions were only the best, of course. Who wanted to celebrate the values of a cruel and barbaric past ruled by despotic nobles, veiled in hunger, darkness and superstition, when civilization had finally arrived? So once again fairy tales were told to confirm social values—even the hero who yearns for foreign lands and wild adventures will always come home to a wife who wishes for nothing but children and a husband to protect her.

  Yes, fairy tales are time machines. They have preserved all the fears and hopes of our ancestors in the folds of their magical cloaks. They make their readers (or listeners) travel through long-vanished landscapes and meet long-dead kings, queens and gods. They remind us how dark the nights once were and how frightening a forest could be even in the bright light of the full moon. Maybe that is one explanation why these tales still cast a spell, although they so often reflect values that make us shudder. Who doesn’t want to travel in time?

  There is also another quality about them. Fairy tales are very honest about the darkness that nests in the human soul. The heroes want power, riches and the most beautiful girl. That’s true at least of Western tales. In the East we may meet a king who becomes a hermit in the end. Or one who is punished by being turned into a woman and actually likes it.

  Mirrors… When I let my hero step through a mirror for the first time in my first Reckless book—the series in which I follow a path of breadcrumbs stolen from fairy tales all over the world—some adults asked me why the tales are so dark. (Children rarely ask that question, maybe because they have a more realistic perception of the world.) I always reply that the darkness found in my books pales in comparison to the cruelty of the original tales. Cannibalism, incest, mutilation and murder… Luckily there is often a magical object available that brings people back to life or most heroes would be dead after a few pages!

  Maybe another aspect that explains the timeless enchantment these strange tales hold is that life and death are shown as two sides of the same coin. The circle of life, the power of nature, the awareness of being part of a web that includes every living thing on this planet, be it plant, animal or human, and the awareness that this net isn’t torn by death—we are so estranged from nature that we have forgotten these truths. In fairy tales animals become humans, and humans wear fur or feathers—or turn into a tree. The world is still whole, not yet remade and defined by humanity. There is no illusion that we can control the wildness of this planet. There is no separation between man and animal, man and plant. The loneliness of modern man, our perception that we are the masters and manipulat
ors of the planet that gave birth to us… we only find that in modern tales.

  So, no, I don’t like fairy tales. Yet some still enchant me profoundly. For in their imagery of monsters and magical things they preserve many forgotten truths. Sometimes we lost the key to decipher them but the images kept their power nevertheless. Try it! Whenever you travel, read a fairy tale from the region or the country you go to. I promise that they are very interesting travel guides. They’ll hand you a skin to walk in that’ll make you feel like a local. You may even learn more about the place than some of its residents remember!

  Oh, yes, what made me choose the tales you’ll find in this book? I let them come to me like magical creatures that cross our path in a labyrinth. Some I found while working on Reckless and they made me take a path I hadn’t foreseen. Some I only discovered when I searched my library for tales that were a bit more rebellious than many of their famous siblings. Others came to me because I wanted this collection to make the reader travel through both familiar and unfamiliar fairy-tale territories. So one could say that chance guided me, curiosity, the wish for less-trodden roads, the love for rebellious heroes and heroines, the eye of the illustrator—who of course was enchanted by the boy drawing cats… As you see, finding these tales was a fairy-tale quest of its own.

  —CORNELIA FUNKE

  A long, long time ago, in a small country village in Japan, there lived a poor farmer and his wife, who were very good people. They had a number of children, and found it very hard to feed them all. The elder son was strong enough when only fourteen years old to help his father; and the little girls learnt to help their mother almost as soon as they could walk.

  But the youngest child, a little boy, did not seem to be fit for hard work. He was very clever—cleverer than all his brothers and sisters—but he was quite weak and small, and people said he could never grow very big. So his parents thought it would be better for him to become a priest than to become a farmer. They took him with them to the village temple one day, and asked the good old priest who lived there if he would have their little boy for his acolyte and teach him all that a priest ought to know.

  The old man spoke kindly to the lad, and asked him some hard questions. So clever were the answers that the priest agreed to take the little fellow into the temple as an acolyte and to educate him for the priesthood.

  The boy learnt quickly what the old priest taught him, and was very obedient in most things. But he had one fault. He liked to draw cats during study hours, and to draw cats even where cats ought not to have been drawn at all.

  Whenever he found himself alone, he drew cats. He drew them on the margins of the priest’s books, and on all the screens of the temple, and on the walls, and on the pillars. Several times the priest told him this was not right; but he did not stop drawing cats. He drew them because he could not really help it. He had what is called “the genius of an artist”, and just for that reason he was not quite fit to be an acolyte; a good acolyte should study books.

  One day, after he had drawn some very clever pictures of cats upon a paper screen, the old priest said to him severely: “My boy, you must go away from this temple at once. You will never make a good priest, but perhaps you will become a great artist. Now let me give you a last piece of advice, and be sure you never forget it. Avoid large places at night; keep to small!”

  The boy did not know what the priest meant by saying, “Avoid large places; keep to small.” He thought and thought, while he was tying up his little bundle of clothes to go away, but he could not understand those words, and he was afraid to speak to the priest any more, except to say goodbye.

  He left the temple very sorrowfully, and began to wonder what he should do. If he went straight home he felt sure his father would punish him for having been disobedient to the priest: so he was afraid to go home. All at once he remembered that at the next village, twelve miles away, there was a very big temple. He had heard there were several priests at that temple, and he made up his mind to go to them and ask them to take him for their acolyte.

  Now that big temple was closed up but the boy did not know this fact. The reason it had been closed up was that a goblin had frightened the priests away and had taken possession of the place. Some brave warriors had afterwards gone to the temple at night to kill the goblin; but they had never been seen alive again. Nobody had ever told these things to the boy, so he walked all the way to the village hoping to be kindly treated by the priests.

  When he got to the village it was already dark, and all the people were in bed; but he saw the big temple on a hill at the other end of the principal street, and he saw there was a light in the temple. People who tell the story say the goblin used to make that light, in order to tempt lonely travellers to ask for shelter. The boy went at once to the temple, and knocked. There was no sound inside. He knocked and knocked again; but still nobody came. At last he pushed gently at the door, and was quite glad to find that it had not been fastened. So he went in, and saw a lamp burning—but no priest.

  He thought some priest would be sure to come very soon, and he sat down and waited. Then he noticed that everything in the temple was grey with dust and thickly spun over with cobwebs. So he thought to himself that the priests would certainly like to have an acolyte, to keep the place clean. He wondered why they had allowed everything to get so dusty. What most pleased him, however, were some big white screens, good to paint cats upon. Though he was tired, he looked at once for a writing box, and found one, and ground some ink, and began to paint cats.

  He painted a great many cats upon the screens, and then he began to feel very, very sleepy. He was just on the point of lying down to sleep beside one of the screens, when he suddenly remembered the words, “Avoid large places; keep to small!”

  The temple was very large; he was all alone; and as he thought of these words—though he could not quite understand them—he began to feel for the first time a little afraid, and he resolved to look for a “small place” in which to sleep. He found a little cabinet with a sliding door, and went into it, and shut himself up. Then he lay down and fell fast asleep.

  Very late in the night he was awakened by a most terrible noise—a noise of fighting and screaming. It was so dreadful that he was afraid even to look through a chink of the little cabinet: he lay very still, holding his breath for fright.

  The light that had been in the temple went out; but the awful sounds continued, and became more awful, and all the temple shook. After a long time silence came; but the boy was still afraid to move. He did not move until the light of the morning sun shone into the cabinet through the chinks of the little door.

  Then he got out of his hiding place very cautiously, and looked about. The first thing he saw was that all the floor of the temple was covered with blood. And then he saw, lying dead in the middle of it, an enormous, monstrous rat—a goblin-rat—bigger than a cow!

  But who or what could have killed it? There was no man or other creature to be seen. Suddenly the boy observed that the mouths of all the cats he had drawn the night before were red and wet with blood. Then he knew that the goblin had been killed by the cats which he had drawn. And then also, for the first time, he understood why the wise old priest had said to him, “Avoid large places at night; keep to small.”

  Afterwards that boy became a very famous artist. Some of the cats which he drew are still shown to travellers in Japan.

  Well, it’s quite obvious why this is one of my favourite fairy tales, isn’t it? The illustrator in me wants to go to a lonely Japanese temple right now and draw cats onto the walls!

  There is a familiar element: the youngest child who is considered quite useless, though in this case his father recognizes his cleverness. In European tales those young sons who turn out to be heroes are mostly described as dumb. But this hero from Japan is not our usual hero, who slays the monster and earns a crown and the princess. This hero learns about his talents as an artist, and the tale doesn’t celebrate physical strength, cleverness, be
auty or power. It celebrates the arts and the belief that what artists create holds the spark of life and can save us from monsters. I wish this tale were read at every school—to inspire some children to become heroes with a pen or brush. We need those so much more than the ones with a sword.

  One note on the style of the narration. It is, of course, not the original Japanese tale; sadly I didn’t find it. Lafcadio Hearn retells the story brilliantly and he definitely knows almost everything about Japan, but his tone is to my ears still the tone of a Western writer—which makes us aware of the fact that a fairy tale changes and shifts with every narrator who passes it on.

  In a nomad camp in the wilds of the Far North lived an old man with his three daughters. The man was very poor. His choom barely kept out the icy wind and driving snow. And when the frost was keen enough to bite their naked hands and faces, the three daughters huddled together round the fire. As they lay down to sleep at night, their father would rake through the ashes; and then they would shiver throughout the long cold night till morning.

  One day, in the depths of winter, a snowstorm blew up and raged across the tundra. It whipped through the camp the first day, then the second, and on into the third. There seemed no end to the driving snow and fierce wind. No bold Nenets dared show his face outside his tent and families sat fearful in their chooms, hungry and cold, dreading that the camp would be blown clean away.

  The old man and his daughters crouched in their tent harking to the howling of the blizzard, and the father said:

  “If the storm continues for much longer, we shall all die for certain. It was sent by Kotura, Lord of the Winds. He must be very angry with us. There’s only one way to appease him and save the camp—we must send him a wife from our clan. You, my eldest daughter, must go to Kotura and beg him to halt the blizzard.”