The second to last story in this collection of Japanese Fairy Tales, “The Hare of Inaba” is more of what you expect, given the previous six fairy tales. Again, the narrator does a great job of capturing the spirit of these children’s stories with the slightest inflection in his voice and once more the tone is consistent throughout all stories.
However, for this story in particular, the voice of the hare (and the raise in pitch) amplifies the lighthearted tone of the story to the point of distortion for the listener. Another way to look at it: It’s overly cute and the length of the rabbit’s monologue doesn’t help. In fact it hurts it, because he basically tells the listener what they already know–as it just happened in the first half of the tale. Yes, this is a problem with the source material, but it became all too apparent with the excess use of a pitch shifter.
This isn’t the first time a filter was applied to the actresses voice. All the small furry animals sound the same across this audio anthology, but they don’t last nearly as long. This is all personal taste, but I imagine a lot of people might get turned off by this effect, especially if you’re paying money for it.
That’s where I have the biggest problem and something I’ve held off on until this final review. This is not worth the price. Even if you have a compelling reason to want to experience Japanese culture through their stories, there are much better ways to do so without spending seven to eight dollars.
After doing some research, I discovered a lot of the tales are in the public domain or at the very least are available to read online without paying. The only reason to buy this is for the audio version of some the tales, emphasis on the word “some.” These are only a fraction of the stories available.
Going back to the story at hand, “The Hare of Inaba,” along with the rest of the fairy tales in this collection, suffer from overused audio cliches like disguising someone’s voice with pitch shifting technology, but thankfully the narrator does a great job at keeping the spirit of the tales alive in a way I haven’t heard done since listening to the “Harry Potter” audiobooks.
The full collection is available for purchase on Amazon (Affiliate Link) and iTunes.
4/5 Stars (for the entire collection)