THE ANIMAL COURT: A Political Fable of...

THE ANIMAL COURT: A Political Fable of Old Japan by Ando Shoeki, translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Hunter (Weatherhill: $12.95; 118 pp . , illustrated, paperback original). This satirical discussion of human vices and follies offers a kind of literary counterpart to the traditional Japanese scrolls that depict animals in comic situations. Shoeki was an eccentric 18th-Century literary figure who maintained that the shifting energy of the universe produced humans (rising energy), plants (descending) and animals (horizontal). His curious theory doesn’t distract from the piquant pleasures of this fable, in which the assembled animals criticize humans for paying lip service to Buddhist and Confucian virtues while failing to live up to them.