Essay: Bad guy in The Crab and the Monkey

This story is from the Japanese Fairy Tales Unit. In the story, The Crab and the Monkey, the monkey is not a very nice animal. He starts off not seeming to be too bad. He makes a trade with the crab. He gives her a kernel of a sweet red kaki fruit in exchange for some rice. The crab, being a generous animal, makes the trade and everything seems fine. She uses the seed to grow a fruit tree and the monkey comes back. This is where we really start seeing the monkey's true character. The monkey asks if he can climb up the tree and get some fruit for himself and he will also get some fruit for the crab. He only throws down the rotten fruit though. He tries to keep all the good fruit for himself.

When he gets down, the crab convinces him to do a somersault and all the fruit falls out and the crab tries to grab some. The monkey gets mad and beats the crab so bad that it nearly kills her. The crab kills the monkey in the end but the monkey shows how horrible he is when he tries to kill the crab.

At no time did I feel sorry for the monkey. The crab was being extremely polite and letting the monkey share what she had but that was not good enough for the monkey. That tends to be the problem with the villains in any story. It does not matter how much other people do for them, it only matters how they can get more. The villains are never satisfied and they don't ever care about anyone but themselves.

The monkey ended up getting what he deserved, the crab kills him in the end. I think this is how the story needed to end because it did not seem as if the monkey would have learned his lesson. He even tries to steal things from the crabs hole when he thinks that the crab is dead. He never showed any remorse and therefore would not have been able to learn his lesson and change. The monkey was just evil and there was no fixing that.

Monkey. Photo taken by Lea Maimone. Wikimedia Commons

This story is from the Japanese Fairy Tales Unit

Reading Diary B: Japanese Fairy Tales (Lang)

These are some of the stories that I liked from the second half of the Japanese Fairy Tales Unit.

The Crab and the Monkey: This story is a good one. The monkey tries to trick the crab and steal all the fruit from her tree. When the crab tricks the monkey too, the monkey gets mad and tries to kill the crab. Luckily the crab has a friend that helps her get better and they decide to get revenge and eventually kill the monkey. The crab is really nice to the monkey throughout the story but even still the monkey is horrible to the crab. I like that the crab won in the end because she was nice the entire time.

The Magic Kettle: What made this story so memorable to me was that the man who ended up by the kettle was so honest. He was a good person because after he had made his riches by using the kettle that turned into a tanuki, he returned the kettle to the original owner and gave him part of the riches. You don't hear many stories where people are so honest and genuinely want to be fair. I really liked this story.


Uraschimataro and the Turtle: This story turns out to be quite sad. Uraschimataro goes under the sea and meets a princess and promises to stay with her. She grants him an everlasting life and he stays with her. He starts to miss his parents and asks to go visit them, only to discover that it is 300 years later and they are obviously gone. He opens the box, that which the princess told him not to, and he turns into an old man and does not return to the princess. He dies shortly after.

Turtle photo taken by Brocken Inaglory. Wikimedia Commons

Reading Diary A: Japanese Fairy Tales (Lang)

These are some of my favorite stories from the Japanese Fairy Tale (Lang) Unit.

The Two Frogs: This story is quite entertaining. The two frogs each want to go where the other is. They meet half-way and decide that they are going to look to see if it is worth it to keep moving. They help each other stand up and they look to see what looks exactly like their hometown. The problem is that their eyes are placed so that they are looking behind them and are actually looking at their home towns. They end up with a completely wrong view of what the other place is and spend the rest of their lives thinking that the two places are exactly the same. Its a shame that they did not continue on to the new place and realize it is completely different.

The Stonecutter: This story is about how if you live your life according to what materials you have, then you will never be satisfied. The stonecutter wished to be rich, but that soon became too boring for him. He wished to be a prince, but that too did not keep him satisfied. This goes on until he realizes that he likes it much better being a person and so he is changed back into a man. This story goes with the saying that the grass is always greener on the other side. There will always be someone else who has it better and so you need to learn to be satisfied with what you have. I like this story for the moral in it.

Mountains photo take by Jamie O'Shaughnessy. Wikimedia Commons