Acknowledgments

This translation benefited greatly from the help of Prof. Robert E. Hegel and Prof. David Rolston, to whom we wish to express our profound gratitude. Prof. Hegel has, from the very conception of this project, given us enthusiastic encouragement and unfailing support. Both professors read the entire manuscript, compared it with the original, pointed out omissions, corrected errors, and made many valuable suggestions for improvement. We also owe Prof. Hegel a debt of gratitude for having obtained for us reproducible copies of a selection of illustrations from the 1620 Chinese edition of Stories Old and New. Our thanks go as well to the Imperial Diet Library of Japan for permitting us to reproduce these illustrations from Nagasawa Kikuya’s volume Mindai sōzubon zuroku: Naikaku bunko shozō tanpen shōsetsu nobu (Tokyo: Nihon Shoshigakkai, 1962). We are very grateful to our editor, Lorri Hagman, for her enthusiasm for the project, her expertise in preparing the book for press, and her sharp eye for detecting errors and inconsistencies. Needless to say, any errors and infelicities that remain are solely ours.