In the Japanese folktale "Chin Chin Kobakama," toothpicks strewn about a floor spring to life in the form of little, peg-legged samurai. The tiny warriors torment a young woman with mockery of her subpar housekeeping.
"She tried to catch some of them, but they jumped about so quickly that she could not," the story goes. "Then she tried to drive them away, but they would not go, and they never stopped singing… or laughing at her. Then she knew they were little fairies and became so frightened that she could not even cry out."
The moral of the story, of course, is to keep a clean house. This 1903 English translation of the tale is recounted in a Japanese chirimen, or crêpe-paper, book, by Lafcadio Hearn, a prominent Japanologist and translator who helped introduce Japanese literature and culture to the Western world in the early 20th century.
The book is displayed in "Textured Stories: The Chirimen Books of Modern Japan," an exhibition at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, part of the Yale Library, on view through May 3.
