About Tabuya
About Tabuya
The tabu-no-ki is an evergreen that often stands in shrine groves near the sea. Tabuya is an archive that reads, one tale at a time, the legend and folktale collections written down across Japan in the Meiji and early Showa years, records each tale's type, the beings in it and where it happened, and arranges them by land.
It is not meant to frighten. It is a place to read, quietly, the stories that stayed in one place.
Source books
All of them are in the public domain.
- Yanagita Kunio, Tono Monogatari (1910) — Aozora Bunko (Japanese text); 118 tales in English
- Ogasawara Kenkichi (ed.), Shiwa-gun Mukashibanashi-shu (1938) — National Diet Library Digital Collections (Japanese text); 87 tales in English
- Inpaku Shiwakai (ed.), Inpaku Mukashibanashi (1911) — National Diet Library Digital Collections (Japanese text); 14 tales in English
Summaries, translation and AI
The Japanese summaries, types and beings were drafted with AI from the source texts; old place names were matched to today's names with our own gazetteer. A summary is a short retelling, not the source text.
The English pages are AI-assisted translations of those Japanese summaries — not translations of the original works. Names, places and numbers are checked mechanically against our records and a fixed glossary; a translation that does not match is not published.
We have not used, and do not use, any published English translation of these works.
Settings and tale numbers
A setting is shown only when a place named in the tale could be matched with confidence; otherwise only the land is given.
Tale numbers for Tono Monogatari are the book's own. For the other two books, numbers follow the order in which the tales appear.
Tales we do not publish
We leave out tales that point to real incidents or victims after the book was published, or that identify existing private land or homes as places to visit — in any language.
Fiction
Our fiction shelf holds new stories set in the present day, written with AI from the types and beings in this archive and chosen by an editor. It is in Japanese only for now.