Aino Folk-Tales: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Aino Folk-Tales, credited to Basil Hall Chamberlain, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Aino Folk-Tales by Basil Hall Chamberlain. Read in English by Expatriate. Not for the squeamish or for children, these folk-tales are from the Ainu, the somewhat mysterious indigenous people of Japan, thousands of whom still live in the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. Ranging over all of the usual themes of folklore, from creation to marriage to war, these stories have a pungent, ribald frankness concerning all aspects of human life that offended their scholarly collector Basil Hall Chamberlain (his apologies to the reader are themselves entertaining) but that make them fresh, provocative, and amusing to the twenty-first century reader. Attention to the Ainu is especially timely because of the revival in Japan of Ainu activism on behalf of indigenous rights, pride, and culture, but are well worth reading for their purely entertainment value.

Recording facts

• Recording title: Aino Folk-Tales
• Author credits: Basil Hall Chamberlain
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 8
• Listed recording duration: 2:21:40

Catalogue topics

• Japanese literature
• folklore
• ainu culture

Track guide

1. 01 - Introductory Material — 23:11
2. 02 - I.a. Tales Accounting for the Origin of All Phenomena (01-10) — 17:08
3. 03 - I.b. Tales Accounting for the Origin of All Phenomena (11-20) — 20:21
4. 04 - II. Moral Tales (21-27) — 19:26
5. 05 - III. Tales of the Panaumbe & Penaumbe Cycle (28-32) — 14:09
6. 06 - IV.a. Miscellaneous Tales (33-37) — 16:52
7. 07 - IV.b. Miscellaneous Tales (38-43) — 19:53
8. 08 - V. Scraps of Folklore (44-54) — 10:40

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.