Myths of China and Japan

The myths of China and Japan set beside those of India, Babylon and Europe: the dragon kings, the sun goddess, the eight immortals, the culture heroes and the flood. Donald Mackenzie wrote a shelf of mythology volumes in the 1920s and was interested chiefly in the borrowings between them. His diffusionist theory is out of favour; the retellings are clear and the comparisons still provoke. Twenty-eight plates of Chinese and Japanese painting, from Xia Gui and Ni Zan to Tani Bunchō, carry the landscapes, figures and flowers that the old stories grew from.