ThoughtAudio.com is offering several free audio books. One of them is Japanese Fairy Tales:
Although they’re not in Japanese, it’s still a good opportunity to listen to some very famous Japanese fairy tales and learn the stories. Then as your Japanese progresses, you can try reading the Japanese version and you’ll already have an idea of what the story is about.
The audio books can be downloaded HERE.
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I’m not sure if it counts as one of the fairy tales, but my personal favourite children’s story is “SaruKaniGassen” (Monkey versus Crab). True, its really quite a violent story when you think about it… but western fairy tales can have some pretty gory premises too! Hansel and Gretel is about an old lady who lures children with candy so that she can eat them, I mean… that’s just gross.
SaruKaniGassen is about a monkey that offers a crab a trade: a persimmon (fruit) for onigiri (rice ball). When the crab gives the monkey the riceball, the monkey throws a rotten persimmon at the crab crushing it and killing it. The crab’s child isn’t too happy about this (as one can imagine) so the crab’s child enlists the aid of bees, chessnuts and a grindstone, in order to exact revenge on the monkey. I won’t give away the ending, but you can probably guess.