桃太郎

About this story

作品について

Momotaro ("Peach Boy") is the best-known folk tale in Japan. It has no author. It was passed on by word of mouth for hundreds of years, and the oldest books of it that survive are from the Edo period. In those early picture books the old couple eat the peach, grow young again, and have a child. The boy who jumps out of the peach became the standard version after the story went into school textbooks in the Meiji period, and since then almost every child in Japan has grown up with it. The story is famous for its sounds, too: どんぶらこ, the sound of the floating peach, is used for this story and almost nothing else. Not everyone has cheered for the hero. Fukuzawa Yukichi told his own children that the treasure belonged to the demons, and in 1924 Akutagawa wrote a version in which the demons are the peaceful ones. This is our own retelling in easy modern Japanese, with furigana on every kanji and grammar around JLPT N4. It follows the story as it is usually told: the peach, the millet dumplings, the dog, the monkey and the pheasant, and the island of demons. The three animals ask the same questions in the same words, so by the third time you will be reading without tapping.