INTRODUCTION
Only three editions of the Taketori—apart from recent reprints—are known to me: one in two thin volumes, quaintly illustrated, block-printed in hiragana with occasional ji in cursive, probably an eighteenth-, possibly a seventeenth-century production; another, also in two volumes, Taketori m. g. shô (notes), 1785, with commentary by Koyama no Tadashi; and lastly the elaborate edition of Tanaka Daishiu (died 1853), in six volumes[7], on which the present translation and most of the notes thereto are based.
The text, no doubt, is more or less corrupt, and this circumstance, in part, explains the occasional roughness of style and the absence of proper articulation at the juncturae. The story of the Mikado’s suit and of the ascension to the moon is fairly free from these defects, and so also is the fictitious narrative, related by the sham hero of the second Quest, of his voyage to Hôrai. Up to the seventeenth century almost all books in Japan, with the exception of Buddhist and Chinese reprints, were manuscripts[8], and it is possible that the Taketori, like the Manyôshiu, was written in Chinese script[9], used more or less phonetically. The reading of this would often be traditional, and copyist errors would be frequent, especially in regard to cursive forms, a combination of sources of confusion that could not but be fruitful in corruptions, as has already been remarked in the case of the Manyôshiu.