One Hundred and One Nights (book)
One Hundred and One Nights () is a book of Arab literature consisting of twenty stories, which presents many similarities to the more famous "One Thousand and One Nights".
List of works influenced by One Thousand and One Nights
This work has been influential in the West since it was translated in the 18th century, first by Antoine Galland. Many imitations were written, especially in France. Various characters from this epic have themselves become cultural icons in Western culture, such as Aladdin, Sinbad and Ali Baba. Part of its popularity may have sprung from the increasing historical and geographical knowledge, so that places of which little was known and so marvels were plausible had to be set further "long ago" or farther "far away"; this is a process that continues, and finally culminate in the fantasy world having little connection, if any, to actual times and places. Several elements from Arabian mythology and Persian mythology are now common in modern fantasy, such as genies, magic carpets, magic lamps, etc. When L. Frank Baum proposed writing a modern fairy tale that banished stereotypical elements, he included the genie as well as the dwarf and the fairy as stereotypes to go.The "Nights" also had an influence on modern Japanese literature. George Fyler Townsend's revised edition of the "Arabian Nights" was the first "European" literary work to be translated into the Japanese language during the Meiji era, by Nagamine Hideki in 1875. The Japanese translation was entitled "Arabiya Monogatari" ("Arabian Stories" or literally "Stormy Night Stories"), as part of the monogatari genre. Though the book was intriguing to Japanese readers who then had very little knowledge of Arabic culture or the Middle East in general, the "Nights" did not gain popularity in Japan until a more Japanified translation, entitled "Zensekai Ichidai Kisho" ("The Most Curious Book in the Whole World"), was produced by Inoue Tsutomu in 1888. His translation exerted a great influence on the literature of the Meiji, Taishō and Shōwa periods, with writers and poets such as Hinatsu Kōnosuke, Hakushū Kitahara and Mokutaro Kinoshita citing the work as an influence on their own works. In the early 20th century, other translations from the Lane and Burton editions were also published, including ones from the Lane edition by Kōnosuke and Morita Sōhei, as well a translation of the Andrew Lang edition by Daisui Sugitani, and translations of individual tales by Iwaya Sazanami. In "Norwegian Wood" by Haruki Murakami, Toru refers to Reiko as a regular Scheherazade when she leaves a story about her past unfinished. Murakami also published a short story entitled, "Scheherazade", in "The New Yorker" in October 2014.