Urashima Tarō

The story

Every evening his mother waited for him on the doorstep, with a lamp in her hand.

Urashima Tarō was a fisherman. He lived with her in a low little house on the seashore, in the province of Tango, and he went out in his boat at dawn. He was not rich. But he could whistle the sailors' songs, mend nets, and answer kindly even people who answered him rudely. That was why everyone in the village was fond of him.

One evening, as he was coming home with his nets over his shoulder, he saw a group of children on the beach, crowded round something.

It was a turtle. A big one, with a dark shell and legs waving in the air. The children kept tipping it over, poking it with a stick and laughing.

“Stop that,” said Urashima.

“It's ours! We found it!”

Urashima searched his pockets. He did not have much: a handful of coins. He gave them to the children, and they went off, a little disappointed, a little ashamed. Then he bent over the turtle, set it the right way up and walked it down to the water.

“Go home,” he said. “And be careful.”

The turtle stopped where the waves broke. For a long moment it looked at him, with shining, calm eyes. Then it dived, and all that was left of it was a ring on the water.

Three days later, while he was fishing out at sea, Urashima heard it knocking against the side of his boat.

“It's me,” said a voice in the mist. “The turtle you saved.”

Urashima looked around. On the surface of the sea, an arm's length away, was a young woman in a robe that shimmered like the inside of a shell.

“Please,” said the woman, “come with me. I live under the sea, in the palace of the Dragon King. I want to thank you.”

“But I can't breathe underwater.”

“I'll hold on to you.”

She held out her hand. It was cold, and at her touch Urashima felt the sea flow into his chest without hurting any more. They went down together, among silver fish, among swaying seaweed, down and down, into a light that grew bluer and bluer.

The palace was made of coral and pearl, with curving roofs that glittered like scales. Inside there were enormous halls, lamps made of shells, and servants with tails. And the woman, whose name was Otohime and who was the daughter of the Dragon King, took him by the hand and offered him a feast like no fisherman had ever seen: so many dishes they could not be counted, and sweet music that came from nowhere, while the fish danced in the water.

When she showed him round the palace, Urashima found four windows. From the first you could see spring, with the cherry trees in blossom. From the second, summer, with green fields. From the third, autumn, with red leaves, and from the fourth, winter, with snow on the pines.

He wished he would never have to leave.

He seemed to stay there three days.

But on the third day, in the middle of a feast, he caught himself gazing into the distance. He was thinking of his mother. Of the lamp on the doorstep, the low house, the sound of the waves he could hear from his bed.

Otohime noticed.

“You want to go back,” she said softly.

“Only to see her. Then, perhaps…”

The princess did not answer. After a while she took out of a drawer a small lacquered box, very beautiful, tied with a silk cord.

“Take it with you. But never open it. Whatever happens, never open it.”

Urashima promised. Then she took the shape of the turtle again, let him climb onto her shell and carried him back to the shore. Urashima looked back only once. He saw the princess watching him from the bottom of the sea, smaller and smaller, until he could no longer tell her apart from the blue.

The beach was the same.

The sea, the rocks, the outline of the hills: all exactly the same. But the house was gone. The neighbours were gone, and the neighbour's boat, and the roof with the lamp. Where the road had been there was a street of houses he had never seen. The people passing by wore strange clothes and looked at him with some curiosity.

“Excuse me,” he asked an old man. “I'm looking for the house of Urashima Tarō.”

The old man frowned and looked at him for a long time, the way you look at someone who ought to be somebody else.

“Urashima Tarō?… My grandmother used to talk about him. A fisherman who went out to sea and never came back. Seven hundred years ago, they say. His mother waited for him for years on the doorstep, with a lamp. There's a grave for her, up on that hill.”

Urashima stood quite still.

He climbed the hill alone, with the box in his hand. He found a stone covered in moss, with a name he knew well. He sat down beside it, and for a long time he thought of nothing at all. The wind stirred the grass. Down below, the sea made the sound it had always made.

Then he went back down to the beach, by now in the evening, and sat on the sand.

He was alone. Nobody in this world knew who he was. He had lost his time, he had lost his mother, and that palace under the sea was too far away, like a dream someone else had dreamt. All he had left was the box, light, lacquered, tied with a cord.

“Perhaps,” he thought, “there's something inside that will take me back.”

He had promised. But there was no one left to keep a promise for, and no reason left to wait.

He untied the cord. He lifted the lid.

Out came a white smoke, light and silent. It rose in a thin cloud and wrapped itself around his whole body, and when it faded away, Urashima looked down: his hands were wrinkled. The hair on his shoulders was as white as sea foam. All the time the sea had spared him caught up with him in a single moment.

Inside the box there was nothing left.

In another version, it is said, the old man rose up into the sky out of the white smoke, turned into a crane, and under the sea a turtle waited for him until the end of time.

Either way, on the beach that evening, there was nothing left but the sound of the water.