unidentified Japanese folktale

[wfle...@gmail.com]

Dear PMJSers,

I have a puzzle (not directly related to my research) that recently sparked my curiosity. Maybe there is an obvious answer, in which case I apologize for revealing my ignorance to anyone.

A friend dropped by the other day and gave me two half-finished bottles of whiskey (he is heading off for a year-long sabbatical in Taiwan and decided to thin out his pantry). One of the bottles is a whiskey called "Kikori," the back label of which features the following text: "KIKORI is inspired by the Japanese folk tale of Visu, an ancient woodsman. Failing to find balance in his lifetime, Visu spends centuries wandering the forest seeking the harmony that had eluded him."

I was naturally amused by the name "Visu" and wondered where it could have come from. (For what it's worth, the whiskey is produced in Kumamoto but seems to be the brainchild of an American with no obvious connection to Japan.)

It didn't take long to trace the story and the name Visu to F. Hadland Davis's "Myths & Legends of Japan," published in 1912. Davis doesn't appear to have known any Japanese and relied heavily on Hearn, Chamberlain, Aston, Dickins, etc. Chapter 9, titled "Legends of Mount Fuji," includes a story (pp. 136-39) about a woodcutter named Visu who comes across two beautiful women (who turn out to be foxes) on Mount Fuji and watches transfixed as they play a game of go. When he comes to, he has a long beard, his axe has crumbled to dust, and he realizes that three hundred years have passed while he sat there.

No source is given for this story, but it obviously traces back to the older, very similar Chinese legend set on Mount Lanke 爛柯山. The woodcutter in that story (as told in the Shuyiji) is named Wang Zhi 王質, or Ō Shitsu in Japanese.

I suppose Visu could be a garbling of Wang Zhi/Ō Shitsu, but obviously there's more to it than that, since Davis is presenting a Japanese variant of the legend set on Mount Fuji, and it seems improbable that a woodcutter in a Japanese folktale would be named Ō Shitsu.

So, does anyone have any idea what Davis's source might have been? I spent a little while trying to track down possibilities but didn't turn up anything in Japanese sources other than retellings of the Lankeshan story.

Update: After writing the preceding, I noticed that the back side of the whiskey label, which is only visible through the inside of the bottle, contains Japanese text. It's a bit hard to read with the liquid still in there, but it is a synopsis in modern Japanese of part of the same legend (but only referring to the woodcutter as "kikori," not Visu). The prose is so bland and simplified that it's hard to tell if it's based on Davis (or the same source Davis used), or if it comes from another source.

All of this is just to satisfy my own curiosity, so I hope no one gets sucked too deep down any rabbit holes...

Thank you,

Will Fleming

UC Santa Barbara

[Leonardo Wolfe]

Dear Dr. Fleming,

I briefly looked into this a few days ago and found a reference by G. Waldo Browne that I believe pre-dates F. Hadland Davis's work. This reference dates to 1901 and can be viewed below:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AThe_new_America_and_the_Far_East%2C_a_picturesque_and_historic_description_of_these_lands_and_peoples_(IA_newamericafareas03brow_0).pdf&page=112

Thus far, I have speculated that "Visu" is a corruption of the Latin vīsū (see vīsus)—chiefly because of the role of sight and seeing in the tale (see p. 444, for example). I also note the mention of "Master Reynard" (see p. 445), which appears to be a reference to Reynard the Fox—a character from medieval European folklore. Thus, clearly some liberties have been taken in mixing stories, in combination with a connection to the Chinese legend you mention.

Kind regards,

Leonardo Wolfe

[Leonardo Wolfe]

Apologies, a small correction. The source dates to 1907, not 1901. I was attempting to read the rather low-resolution front matter and read the number one as a seven. Consequently, it would seem to predate F. Harland Davis' work by only five years.

On a separate note, he is described as a "young giant" on p. 444, but I don't see any clear connection to ダイダラボッチ-type tales, and, regardless, would interpret that figuratively rather than literally.

Kind regards,

Leonardo Wolfe

[Conor Aherne]

Dear Will (if I may),

Thanks for sharing this interesting riddle! Other qualified colleagues may have more plausible answers soon, but a few things seem to be clear (and I apologise if these are already apparent to you):

1) The story of Wang Zhi was familiar to Heian-period writers (a Sugawara no Michizane kanshi comes to mind)

2) Foxes and igo sometimes appear in pre-modern literature (setsuwa), as the former are tricky, cunning and also might have supernatural skill at the game. 

The likely answer (and, again, others may have more nuanced replies that can bridge the gap between premodern and when Davis was writing around a millennium years later), is that Davis simply took two different threads (that of Wang Zhi and foxes playing igo) and combined them here, although I look forward to other replies that may thicken the plot, as it were. 

Best wishes,

Conor Aherne

CIEE Kyoto

Center Director

[Stephen Robertson]

Hi Will,

I'll admit that I did drop down a few rabbit holes, but it was an interesting diversion for a rainy morning. From what I can tell, Davis invented the name Visu for the tale - which he seems to have taken  from Edward Greey's The Golden Lotus and Other Legends of Japan (1883), who in turn seems to have lifted it from W.E. Griffis's Mikado's Empire (1876). The name given to the wood-cutter in these earlier versions is Lu-Wen. There doesn't seem to be any reference to the name Visu until Davis's rendition.

Griffis introduces the story as a Chinese tale retold in Japanese, so it's almost certainly the Lankeshan story at heart. From Griffis:

I have an ivory and a wood carving, both nitsuki, representing the Japanese form of the story of Rip Van Winkle, which is, perhaps, a universal myth. The ivory figure is that of an old man leaning on the handle of an axe. His hair is long and white, and his snowy beard sweeps his breast and falls below his girdle. He is intently watching two female figures playing a game of checkers. The story (of Chinese origin) is, as told by Japanese story-tellers, as follows....

Seven years later, Greey prefaces it thusly for his 1883 book.

MANY of the most beautiful stories told by the hanashika are of Indian or Chinese origin, and are as old as the hills. Among the most popular and charming is the legend of Lu-wen, the wood-cutter, which bears such a striking resemblance to Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" that the latter appears to be a plagiarism of the Oriental tale. The following is the Japanese version: —

And then dresses it up a little more for a revised serial publication the next year, implausibly claiming that he discovered it as "The Original Version of Rip Van Winkle"

WHEN Washington Irving wrote the story of "Rip Van Winkle," the public praised his wonderful imagination, and pronounced the tale original, while, in reality, he had merely digested and rearranged in homely form an exceedingly beautiful Eastern legend that is as old as the hills.
I have, in making this assertion, no desire to belittle the illustrious dead who, apart from his "Knickerbocker Tales," wrote many charming works, my object being to give the source from which he derived his idea.
The story can be traced to a Sanscrit origin, and is well-known in India, China and Japan, where it forms the theme of many works of fiction, poems, songs, dramas and paintings. During my residence in Tokio, I came across a novel based upon the legend, the scenes of which were laid in China, and, roughly translated, ran as follows:

That Greey hijacked Griffis's version is evident from a shared (and glaring) geographical error in the opening line of the tale:

Griffis: 

Lu-wen was a pious wood-cutter, who dwelt at the base of the majestic and holy mountain Tendai, the most glorious peak of the Nan-Lin range, in China.

 

Greey:

"The priests say, 'Pray continually: for every prayer uttered in this state you will escape a moment of pain in the next.' While this is well enough for persons who have nothing to do but to supplicate the gods, it is a bad doctrine to teach those who have families to support; in proof of which I will relate the story of Lu-wen, who, many centuries ago, dwelt in the shadow of the sacred mountain of Tendai, the highest peak of the Nanlin range [China].(1883)

 

In the golden days, when the benign gods were in the ascendency, there lived at the foot of the sacred mountain Tendai, the most beautiful peak of the Nan-lin range, a pious man

named Lu-wen, who once earned his living by cutting wood for the people of his native commune (1884)

He also added a number of elements - a priest, a wife, a divorce, a span of three hundred years, women who turn into foxes - that are all carried wholesale into Davis's version, but which are absent from Griffis..

Incidentally, Davis's version also combines the story with the legend of Mount Fuji appearing overnight on the plains of Suruga (which Griffis also had a version of, sans wood-cutter, (actually, sans-protagonist full stop) in his Japanese Fairy World (1880). Davis's bibliography - which runs to more than 70 authors and does include Griffis - suspiciously does not actually mention Greey.

That's about as deep as I could chase that rabbit...

All the best,

Stephen

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[Leonardo Wolfe]

Dear members,

Sincere apologies as I must make a correction to a correction.

"[...] and read the number one as a seven. [...]" should have been "[...] and read the number seven as a one. [...]", however, I am quite mistaken anyway. Browne's work was first published in 1901, republished in 1907, and appeared in Japan: The Place and the People in 1904. In other words, the gap is approximately eleven years, rather than five.

Dr Fleming's reply has become separated from the main thread, but to paste it below,

"My thanks to Leonardo, and to Lena Baibikov and Yu Zhang, who replied off-list. It seems the story goes back a few years earlier, but the name Visu remains of unclear origin--perhaps from Latin vīsū, as suggested by Leonardo (this seems the most compelling to me, esp. given the reference to Reynard as well) or perhaps garbled from weiqi (the Chinese word for go), as suggested by Lena, or Wang Zhi (the name of the character in the Chinese story). Thank you, Will Fleming"

Dr. Robertson's reply, perhaps unseen by Dr. Fleming at the time of writing, highlights some even earlier sources, however, the name "Visu" still seems to only go back as far as Browne. As for Browne, I haven't found any evidence that he was educated in Latin or French, but it would seem appropriate for his time that he at least had a rudimentary understanding of Latin. Furthermore, he also seems to have been familiar with French history and stories as well. Having said all of this, I also find no evidence of Browne even having visited Japan.

Going back to Dr. Robertson's research, the version presented in Mikado's Empire is barely a single page (Link), whilst the version in The Golden Lotus and Other Legends of Japan, running at several pages more, can be summed up by an extract from its last paragraph; "[...] an idle legend, invented by storytellers to frighten lazy persons who pretend to be pious in order to avoid labour [...]". In other words, I find the Browne version to be superior in literary development, but this still begs the question, "How did 'Lu-wen' become 'Visu', if not a corruption of Latin (or French)?" A poor transliteration of wéiqí seems a little far-fetched to me.

Kind regards,

Leonardo Wolfe

[Scheid, Bernhard]

As a dedicated Go player I kind of collected tales about Go albeit not systematically. Of course, I came across the lanke/ranka 爛柯 (rotten axe) motif but never in connection with foxes or women. The players were always old male immortals. As regards women playing Go, the story of Prince Genji spying the court ladies Utsusemi and her stepdaughter at the Go board comes to mind, a favorite motif of ukiyoe prints related to Go that was often transferred to Edo pleasure quarters. But still no foxes. I therefore suspect that Greey (or his source) just freely synthesized a couple of Japanese motifs, including translations by Hearn and others as well as ukiyoe sketches of the fox ladies Kuzu no ha and Tamamo no mae, into one story. If I am wrong, and there really exists a story about fox women playing Go at Mount Fuji, I would be eager to learn more about it.

 

Bernhard Scheid

 

From: pm...@googlegroups.com <pm...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Stephen Robertson
Sent: Sunday, July 19, 2026 1:20 AM
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Subject: [EXT] Re: [PMJS] unidentified Japanese folktale

 

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[Leonardo Wolfe]

Dear Dr.  Scheid,

You may want to review some of my comments here:

https://groups.google.com/g/pmjs/c/hkZx1AIRkws/m/SEJUhmvQAgAJ

I raise this due to the notion of transformation, which, as you'll already be aware, is closely related to foxes.

Another tale that comes to mind is that of the Ghost Cat of Nabeshima, but, as the name suggests, this involves a cat rather than a fox.

With regards to the trope of the "femme fatale" fox, I recommend Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative by Rania Huntington.

Kind regards,

Leonardo Wolfe