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Shojoji no Tanuki Bayashi appears on the following albums:

Album	Shakuhachi	Koto	Shamisen
Music of Japan  (Listen)
An orchestration from a children’s song. Tanuki is a kind of a badger inhabiting east Asia and Japan. There are in Japan many folk-stories about tanuki: it is believed that it can take various forms, such as a man, a woman and any other thing, and that it often bewitch men. A tale "Mujina" in the famous "Kwaidan" or a ghost story by Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) is based upon one of these folk-stories about tanuki (Mujina is another name for tanuki.) Hearn's tale is a ghastly one. but, generally speaking, most folk-stories about tanuki have some comical elements. The present children’s song deals with one of such comical tales. Tanuki is also believed to play drum music by drumming its belly. Especially, a story told at a temple named Shojoji says that at moonlight nights a number of tanuki appear in the temple garden and, forming a tanuki-percussion-band, so to speak, play their drum music competing with the temple priest who chants a service percussing a mokugyo or a wood- block. The original song even is very rhythmic, and the rhythmic and percussive side is still more emphasized in the orchestration recorded here. The same song was once taken up by Arthur Kitt and was arranged into a jazz piece.