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Rating: 
Summary: less good than bad
Review: I was a bit disappointed at the selection of stories... but I can't blame the publishers. Blame the original medieval author, Saikaku, for writing tales that are somewhat predictable and... repetitive? Samurai falls in love with a beautiful boy. Samurai pledges undying love to the beautiful boy in a prose-filled letter or Samurai follows the beautiful boy to the ends of the earth. Beautiful boy eventually notices samurai. They either die for honor or live happily ever after. The books is 110 pages long, with size 12 font and 1-1/2 inch margins. o_o In other words, painfully short. The book is separated into three sections: samurai love failed, stalemated, and victorious. All of them pretty much follow the guideline above. However, there were a few gems in all the mediocre (and sometimes exceedingly corny) stories. The first in the book tells the tale of two lovers, fated to die. One of the later stories is a monk's letter to his friend about the beautiful youth he saw one day, filled with lovely prose. One of them cracked me up with the tale of two aged men who are the "greatest women-haters on the earth." However, other than those few, many other stories are corny and others, others pathetically funny (when they're not intended to be). If I'm going to pay ten dollars for this book, there could be at LEAST some more substance, or more selections from Saikaku's works.
Rating: 
Summary: not gay and not a translation from Japanese
Review: Mathers translated these tales, not from Japanese, but from the French translation of Mardrus, and they appeared originally in a three-volume collection called Eastern Love (1930). Hency this is more correctly called the Mardrus-Mathers translation. Mathers never used the word "gay", this is anachronistic and it is the publisher who created the title. The men and boys of old Japan who had love affairs were not gay, not queer, but pederastic or pedophile. This was a whole different situation from modern Japan. It had more in common with ancient Greece. They moved in a world that had nothing in common with the modern world, their values were entirely different.
Rating:
Summary: not gay and not a translation from Japanese
Review: Mathers translated these tales, not from Japanese, but from the French translation of Mardrus, and they appeared originally in a three-volume collection called Eastern Love (1930). Hency this is more correctly called the Mardrus-Mathers translation. Mathers never used the word "gay", this is anachronistic and it is the publisher who created the title. The men and boys of old Japan who had love affairs were not gay, not queer, but pederastic or pedophile. This was a whole different situation from modern Japan. It had more in common with ancient Greece. They moved in a world that had nothing in common with the modern world, their values were entirely different.
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