Beneath the Moon - Yoshi Yoshitani

Beneath the Moon, curated by visual artist Yoshi Yoshitani, is a beautifully illustrated anthology containing 78 short retellings of individual fairytales, myths, folklore, and cultural stories.

Like many born in the 90s, my exposure to fairytales of any kind was through Disney films. I was enamored by the classics - Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and so forth. Back then, I clung to the image of Princess Jasmine. I still do to this day. There was very limited exposure to Asian fairy-and-folk tales growing up and so there were very limited icons for the little brown girls in the room. I often wondered where they were hiding. It seems that Yoshitani had the same question in mind when she created Beneath the Moon.

I stumbled upon Yoshitani through her artwork at a comic convention and instantly fell in love. Her art portrays folklore imagery from both her Japanese background and from cultures around the world. This artwork is mimicked in the anthology, guided by a multicultural lens she applies to all of her work. For Yoshitani, it is clearly important to approach the world in this manner.

Why is that?

In her introduction to readers, Yoshitani explains how her experience growing up in a mixed household - Japanese and American - is becoming more and more common with each passing generation. The inevitable mixing of cultures can also brew conflict amongst varying identities. This is true for both people as individuals as well as amongst different communities. However, Yoshitani found that despite how different cultures may seem, each one contains its own collection of traditional stories. Some stories may have never been heard outside of one’s own culture while others have been shared across generations and morphed into their own rendering. The constant here is that stories provide opportunities for the audience to learn, understand, and appreciate the culture from which they originate.

It is the same principle why it’s important to read and expose people to more stories that are different from those which we are familiar with. If the “Great American Novel” was only to be defined by a singular identity, we’d continue to exclude the various experiences and identities that make up the same world we all live in. Unfortunately, this was our guiding principle and it is why it has taken so long for other little brown girls like me to find more than just Princess Jasmine as their relatable icon in classic literature and fairytales.

Knowing this, it’s no wonder why Yoshitani’s collection intentionally features more stories than those made famous by Disney, including Hindu Epics, Native American mythology, and even Southern Alabama folk stories. For each story, she mentions the title, region of origin as well as region-type. For example, one of the first stories introduced to readers is “The Nightingale,” a Danish fairytale that originates from China. Several stories later, we’re introduced to the story “Turandot” which also originated in China, but is known as an Arabic folktale. The resulting effect is an understanding that stories are more complex in their identity and origin than one may think. Each story is told as a one-page snapshot that carries the intended meaning and most important parts of the tale with it. As a reader familiar with some of the original stories she portrays, as well as their variances amongst other communities, I felt that nothing integral to the original text was watered down or forgotten.

“This collection of stories is meant to serve as a small window into many different cultures,” Yoshitani explains in her introduction. “I hope you enjoy this collection and leave wanting to learn even more about each other, all of us living beneath the same moon.”

Article edited by Lola Lujan.