A life documented through travel and diaries
Smith lived from 1858 to 1918. Japan’s National Diet Library identifies him as a British naturalist and adventurer. His illustrated diaries provide a more substantial record of his travels than the limited early personal history established by the sources checked here. Material covering 1898–1907 was later published in an edition prepared by Victoria Manthorpe in 1986.
In his 1908 preface, Smith describes years spent collecting for the British Museum and trawling and dredging in Japan’s Inland Sea. These activities brought him into contact with fishers, farmers, priests, doctors and children, from whom he gathered stories. Observation, sport, collecting and storytelling therefore meet within his record. The accounts remain those of a visiting collector, dependent on local knowledge and on the people who helped him understand and present it.
The people between a story and the printed page
A. & C. Black published Ancient Tales and Folk-lore of Japan in 1908. Smith thanks translators of notes and manuscripts, his interpreter Yuki Egawa and Mo-No-Yuki, who drew and painted the illustrations from Smith’s sketches. The preface makes their different contributions explicit.
Trees, water, buildings and named places repeatedly become settings for supernatural encounters. The inspected plates give a vessel on dark water and a willow-side meeting a visible atmosphere, while captions connect the scenes to particular tales. The book preserves a process of hearing, selecting and interpreting stories as well as the narratives themselves. Its marvels belong to the accounts being retold; the collector’s route into them and his collaborators’ mediation give the volume its specific historical form.
