Customer Reviews

The Adventure of Momotaro, the Peach Boy (Kodansha Children's Bilingual Classics)

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Latest printing of this book is defective and missing vital text from nearly every page!


I'm not exaggerating. The book is actually missing entire sentences off of every single page!

I don't know how this got past whoever proofreads these things. My speculation would be that the proofreader spoke no Japanese whatsoever,as it's the Japanese half of the bilingual text that has missing sentences. However, lack of Japanese knowledge is not much of an excuse considering some of the missing sentences show up on page 48 translated into English as part of the translation notes.

In fact, using the translation notes alone as a guide to what is missing, there are nearly 80 sentences/phrases missing from the Japanese text of the story. For those of us keeping track, this is a very short book -- meaning nearly half the book has been gutted of content making this story incomprehensible if you can only read the Japanese text.

Also note that although the copyright in English says 1993; the Japanese copyright on the last page of the book says February 6 2004 -- which is probably the actual date of this print run . I contacted both publisher of the book and Amazon.com this morning via e-mail concerning this issue and await their response.

In the meantime, I would advise anyone not to buy this book new unless you cannot read Japanese and have no intentions of learning Japanese. Find a used copy of an earlier printing instead until the problem is resolved.

The fun book. This is a good book to read not only for kids but also adults. Reading this book might give some idea to understand the Japanese culture, because these stories are well known in Japan. I like the stories, too.