Masako’s story was comprehensible enough. After all, no matter where your grandmother comes from, she has probably told you at least one story of a wicked old creature living under a bridge who snarled at dogs and ate little children.

We were not unfamiliar with the phenomenon called ogre. The story spoke to each of us within our own familiar frames of reference.

Later I found out that the ogre in Masako’s story was not an ogre, exactly. He was rather like a demon or a goblin—maybe an elf.  He had fangs and yellow eyes. Sometimes he was bad, other times he was good. Masako’s ogre, called an oni, is defined by the Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan as:

A horned, ferocious, scarlet-faced figure usually equated in folktales, proverbs, and common parlance with a demon or ogre. His true nature, however, is more complex and ambivalent, having a benevolent, tutelary face as well as a demonic one.

These multiple faces, in fact, make the oni an object of both fear as well as compassion. It’s true nature is perhaps an exaggerated version of the gamut of human emotions. According to folklorist Richard M. Dorson, nothing characterizes the creature better than its sheer stupidity.

Masako and I decided to write her tale in English so that others could hear it told. We met during lunch every day and soon discovered that there were other problems to be addressed besides the English equivalent of oni. Our traditions of storytelling each presupposed a completely different set of givens.

I found that the narrative voice I adopted for telling Perrault—esque stories to American children was much too melodramatic for Japanese tales, where the sudden twists and turns in plot must be kept to a minimum. In the stories that I was accustomed to, the energy of the telling hinged on a carefully cultivated element of surprise.  In the tradition of Japanese storytelling, the audience knows from the outset what will happen. The trick is to build up a credible portrait slowly and steadily so that, at the close, the composite picture will strike deeply and truly.

A year later, I discovered that The Ogre Who Cried was not a folktale that had been told generation to generation, as all the students in my class had thought.