KASSEL Grimm's Fairy Tales are among the best read stories in Japan, DPA reported. The fanciful and sometimes gruesome stories of Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel, are not just children's bedtime stories, but also adorn adult bedside tables.

A new edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales is on Japan's bestseller lists, reports Burkhard Kling, head of the Brothers Grimm Publishing House in Steinau An Der Strasse, Germany.

Many Japanese know more about Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and other folk tales of the German Romantic Period than Germans themselves, he said.

"The Brothers Grimm are better known than Goethe in Japan," confirmed Bernhard Lauer, head of the Grimm Museum in Kassel, in the German state of Hesse, and secretary of the Brothers Grimm Society, which has 400 academic members.

Brigitte Buchholz-Bloedow, administrator of the German Fairy Tale Route that runs nearly 600 kilometers through Germany from Hanau to Bremen, is also astounded at the Japanese interest. "They know so very much about the Grimm brothers, much more than the average German," she said.

Japanese visitors make up nearly a quarter of all visitors to the Grimm Museum in Kassel, where in the 19th century the brothers gathered the majority of the fairy tales handed down the generations by word of mouth. Lauer estimates between 5,000 and 10,000 Japanese visitors a year come to the museum in Kassel, which is due to reopen in June after renovation. The Grimms, who published the first edition of their ***"Kinder Und Hausmaerchen"*** (Grimm's Fairy Tales) in 1812, are also popular among Koreans, Chinese and North Americans.

Japanese fans also visit Hanau, where the Grimms were born in 1785 and 1786, and Steinau, in the main-Kinzig Kreis, where the brothers spent their youth. Today the home in which they grew up houses an exhibition, which offers an insight into their lives and their influence.

But the biggest tribute to the Grimms is in Japan: on the island of Hokaido is the "Brothers Grimm Happy Kingdom", a fantasy park inhabited by princesses, witches and dwarfs. It even has a replica of the Hanau Town Hall and the Grimm brothers' home in Steinau.

The fairy tales are so popular in Japan that television teams regularly travel to the authentic homes of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm to film. This year German Grimm fans are returning the compliment by making a pilgrimage to Japan: the town of Hanau will this year perform part of their fairy tale festival in its twin town of Tottori.

Isamitsu Murayama, a Japanese expert on German literature living in Frankfurt, believes the Japanese interest in the Brothers Grimm has to do with the "dark side" of the stories. The seemingly harmless tales have their gruesome moments, says the 37-year-old who is writing a phd on the poetic conception of the Grimms. "Prudery is still very widespread in Japan," he said. That is why there is greater interest in those fairytales, he said.

But the Kassel Grimm Museum curator Lauer believes the Japanese interest in the fairy tales has historical roots. When Japan opened up in 1867 it oriented itself on Germany as the biggest power in Europe. German romanticism was conveyed in Japan through these folk tales.