I'm reading Japanese Tales by Royall Tyler and in the chapter I'm on, there are multiple folk tales mentioning "genies" as malicious spirits. This was peculiar to me, as genies are Middle-eastern afaik and Japan is a long way from the Middle East. Are these actually genies adopted from middle eastern folklore or are they completely different creatures simply called "genies" for translation purposes?
Can you provide the context and title for one of these tales? I'm also guessing the Kanji or original text isn't in the story as that would provide the most context if you had it.
From an inital guess I would say he's translating the Japanese Yōkai into Genie to make it more readable and relatable to a Western Audience.
Yōkai themselves are a very varied concept and range from what we'd think of as ghosts to devils and demons or fairies. Some of them do have powers you could associate with Genies such as transformation or granting wishes.