Clearly, Zore Neale Hurston uses her African background for her works. At the same time, we notice that there are some familiar aspects shared by Hurston's world and Japanese society. The familiarity of Hurston's world to the Japanese becomes particularly evident when we examine The Legends of Tono by Kunio Yanagita. Furthermore, we can find that Hurston's and Yanagita's world shares several aspects with southeast Asian world, where people still believe in animism. This tells us that both Hurston and Yanagita are most likely to intend to reconstruct the ancient religious faith erased by Christianity in the western world and to practice the theory of co-existence on the basis of the animistic way of thinking.