Tales of a Dust Mound

Abstract

Chirizuka Monogatari, or "Tales of a Dust Mound", is a collection of sixty-five stories in six books, mainly about historically celebrated figures, including emperors, priests, warriors, and mountain ascetics. According to the brief preface, the unidentified compiler or author gathered notable tales of the past with thirty-two illustrations to educate young people. Here I have translated forty one tales with the illustrations which appear in Chirizuka Monogatari, presently owned by Tokyo Daigaku Shiryō Hensanjo. In translation, I placed family names first in the Japanese style. All the story titles and the information in the brackets are supplied by the translators. Diacritics are deleted in popular place-names including Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kanto, Honshu, Kyushu. For dates and years, the Gregorian calendar is used in place of the old Japanese way of calculation, as in 1596 for the first year of Keichō.