Otogizōshi: The Fairy Tale Book of Dazai Osamu

by Osamu Dazai

  “Oh? So she too drinks this cherry wine? It really is good stuff, isn’t it? It’s all a man needs. Mind if I have a bit more?”

  “Help yourself. To practice self-restraint in a place like this would be the height of idiocy. You have unlimited license here. Why don’t you eat something as well? Every algae bush you see is a rare delicacy. You want something substantial? Or something light and tart? Any flavor you like, we’ve got it.”

  “I can hear the harp again. I suppose it’s all right to lie down and listen awhile.”

  Unlimited license. This is something Urashima has never before experienced. Forgetting all about his refinement—and everything else, for that matter—he sprawls out on his back. “Ahh... It feels good to get high and just stretch out like this. Wouldn’t mind nibbling on something while I’m at it. Is there any algae here that tastes like roasted pheasant?”

  “There is,” says the tortoise.

  “And, let’s see, how about mulberries?”

  “I suppose you can find that flavor too. But I must say you’ve got awfully provincial tastes.”

  “Just revealing my true colors. I’m only a hick from the sticks, y’know.” Even his manner of speaking has changed.

  Looking up, he can see a misty blue dome made of schools of countless fish serenely revolving high above him; and even as he watches, one school breaks away from the others and swiftly scatters in every direction, silvery scales glinting and swirling like snow in a raging blizzard.

  In the Dragon Palace there is no day or night. It’s like a perpetual morning in May, cool and fresh and suffused with leafy green rays of light. Urashima has no idea how long he’s been here now, but he has indeed been granted unlimited license during his stay. He has even visited Princess Oto’s chambers. She displays not the slightest aversion, but merely smiles her faint, ambiguous smile.

  A time comes, however, when Urashima has had his fill. Perhaps he’s grown bored with absolute freedom. He begins to miss his modest life on land and to think of those who remain there, fretting over their mutual criticisms, weeping with sorrow and rage, furtively living out their meager lives, as charming and somehow very beautiful.

  He goes to Princess Oto and bids her farewell. Even this sudden departure of his is met with only a wordless smile of acquiescence. Nothing is unacceptable. He’s been given unlimited license from the very beginning of his stay until the very end. Princess Oto comes as far as the great stairway to see him off and silently hands him a seashell. It’s a tightly closed bivalve shell of five brilliant colors. This is, of course, the famous “jeweled box” that Urashima carries home with him.

  Once you’ve climbed to the top, ’sno fun coming down. In a kind of daze he settles on the tortoise’s back again and leaves the palace behind. A strange sort of melancholy wells up in his breast. Ah! he thinks, I forgot to say thank you! There’s nowhere in the world to match that place! I should have stayed forever! But he knows he’s a creature of the land. No matter how easy life may have been in the Dragon Palace, his own home, his old hometown, would forever be on his mind. Even when drinking that wonderful wine, his dreams were always of home.

  It saddens him to admit it, but he knows he isn’t worthy of living a life of ease in that wonderful palace.

  “Ngah! This won’t do! I feel so lonesome!” Urashima croaks with something very close to despair. “Tortoise! Let me hear some of those spirited wisecracks of yours! You haven’t said a word since we left.” Which is true. The tortoise has been silently flapping his fins and forging doggedly ahead. “Are you angry? Angry because I’m leaving so suddenly, like a guest who eats and runs?”

  “Don’t be neurotic. This is what I hate about you landlubbers. You want to leave, you leave. How many times have I told you that, from the very beginning? Anything you want to do is fine.”

  “You do seem rather down in the mouth, though.”

  “Look who’s talking. As for me, well, I don’t mind welcoming people, but seeing them off just isn’t my cup of tea.”

  “’Sno fun, eh?”

  “’Sno time for bad puns. I’ll tell you, though, I never could get enthusiastic about these send-offs. All I can do is sigh, and anything I think of to say sounds so empty. I just want to get to goodbye and get it over with.”

  “So you feel sad too?” Urashima is touched. “Well, allow me to express my gratitude for all you’ve done for me. I mean that.”

  The tortoise doesn’t reply but jiggles his shell as if to brush off the sentiment and continues paddling onward and upward.

  “I guess she’s back down there now amusing herself all alone.” A disconsolate sigh escapes Urashima’s lips. “She gave me this beautiful shell. It’s not something to eat, is it?”

  The tortoise guffaws.

  “It didn’t take you long down there to become a real pig, did it? No, the shell isn’t for eating. There may be something inside it. I’m not sure.”

  Let us pause here for a moment. It would be easy to interpret the tortoise’s casual remark as a sinister appeal to human curiosity, made much in the spirit of the serpent of Eden. Perhaps, one thinks, it is simply the nature of cold-blooded creatures to pull such tricks. But no. To see the tortoise’s words in this way would be to do the good fellow a great disservice. Didn’t he himself once insist that he was “a genuine Japanese tortoise” and not to be compared with the serpent in the Garden? What reason have we to disbelieve him? Judging from his attitude toward Urashima up to this point, one must conclude that the tortoise scarcely seems the sort to whisper seductively while secretly plotting destruction. In fact, he seems quite the opposite of a deceptive schemer—he is, rather, as open as a carp streamer in the winds of May. In other words, he harbors no evil intentions. So I, at least, prefer to believe.

  “But you might be better off not opening that shell,” he goes on. “It’s likely to contain, at the very least, the spirit energy of the Dragon Palace. Released on land, it could induce strange, mirage-like visions—or even madness. Then again, for all I know, the tides might rise in a surge and flood the earth. Let’s just say that I don’t think anything good could come of releasing whatever’s inside.”

  There’s no nonsense in the tortoise’s voice, and Urashima is convinced of his sincerity.

  “Perhaps you’re right. In any case, the noble atmosphere of the Dragon Palace could only be defiled by the coarse and brutish air of earth. It might even cause an explosion of some sort. I’ll store the shell at home, unopened, and treasure it as a family heirloom.”

  They’ve now reached the surface of the sea. The sunlight is blindingly bright, but Urashima can see the beach of his old hometown. He can scarcely wait to run home, call his mother and father and sister and brother and all the servants together, and regale them with a detailed account of his visit to the Dragon Palace, filling them in on his newly acquired knowledge. Adventure is the power to believe. The customs of this world are just mean-spirited games of Monkey See, Monkey Do. Orthodoxy is merely another name for the commonplace. The ultimate refinement is the state of Divine Resignation, which is by no means to be confused with just giving up. There’s no caviling criticism in the Dragon Palace, only an eternal smile of acceptance. You’re given unlimited license. Do you understand? The guest is completely forgotten about! Ah, how could you understand? And if that stark realist of a brother of his displays even a hint of disbelief, all Urashima will have to do to squelch him is to thrust that beautiful souvenir from the palace in front of his nose.

  He’s so worked up that as soon as they reach shore he leaps from the tortoise’s back and runs for home, forgetting even to bid his ride farewell, but...

  What happened to the village?

  What happened to the house?

  Nothing to see but empty fields.

  No people! No roads!

  And the only sound was the wind in the pines.

  That’s how the story goes. After much bewilderment and despair, Urashima decides to pry open the shell. But, again, I
don’t feel that the tortoise bears any responsibility for that. This weakness of human beings—the psychology that makes us particularly curious about what’s inside something we’re told we mustn’t open—is also treated in Greek mythology, with the story of Pandora’s box. But Pandora was the victim of a revenge scheme cooked up by the gods. They announced a prohibition on opening the box because they craftily foresaw that her curosity would get the better of her. Our good tortoise, on the other hand, was simply being considerate when he warned Urashima. I think it’s safe to trust him on this, if only because he uttered his warning with such uncharacteristic earnestness. The tortoise was an honest fellow.

  But, although I can confidently attest that the tortoise is not to blame, we’re left with another baffling question. When Urashima opens his gift, white smoke rises up from inside and he himself is instantly transformed into a three-hundred-year-old man. And that’s how the story ends: he shouldn’t have opened the shell after all—just look what happened to the poor fellow! I, however, am deeply suspicious of this ending. Does it not imply that Princess Oto’s gift was a device for exacting revenge or meting out punishment, just like Pandora’s box? Did the princess—even as she smiled in noble silence and granted unlimited license—secretly harbor a dark, sadistic side and a desire to punish Urashima for his selfish ways? Surely not, but why then would Princess Oto, the ultimate in refinement, give her guest such an incomprehensible gift?

  From Pandora’s box, all the malign hobgoblins known to man—disease, fear, enmity, grief, suspicion, jealousy, wrath, hatred, execration, impatience, remorse, cravenness, avarice, sloth, violence, and what have you—arose in a swarm like flying ants and dispersed to lodge and thrive in every corner of the earth. But when Pandora hung her head, aghast at what she’d done, it’s said that she discovered, stuck to the bottom of the box, a tiny, starlike jewel. And written on the jewel was, of all things, the word hope. At this, it’s said, a hint of color returned to Pandora’s pallid cheeks. And ever since then, thanks to this “hope,” human beings have been able to summon the courage to endure the tribulations visited upon them by the aforementioned hobgoblins.

  Compared to such a box, Urashima’s souvenir of the Dragon Palace has no charm or appeal whatsoever. All it contains is smoke and an instant ticket to extreme old age. Even if a tiny star of hope had remained at the bottom of the seashell, Urashima was now three hundred years old. To give hope to a tercentenarian would be little more than a cruel joke. Hope is useless to him now. How about slipping him a little of that Divine Resignation? Then again, any man three centuries old is going to be resigned already, whether or not you bestow such an affected keepsake upon him. In the end, there’s nothing you can do to mitigate what has happened. No way to save Urashima. Look at it any way you like, this would seem to have been a singularly ghastly gift. But we can’t just throw in the sponge here. What if Westerners were to get wind of this and run around claiming that Japan’s fairy tales are more brutal or gruesome than their darling Greek myths? That would be too mortifying for words. In order to avoid dishonoring the fabled Dragon Palace, therefore, I am determined to find an exalted meaning behind that puzzling gift.

  It may be true that a few days in the Dragon Palace are equivalent to a few centuries on land, but why was it necessary to bundle up all the time that had dripped past and give it to Urashima to carry home with him? If he had simply been transformed into a white-haired old man the moment he set foot on land, one could appreciate the logic. But if, in her mercy, Princess Oto had wanted Urashima to remain a young man forever, why go to the trouble of giving him a gift too volatile to be opened? She could have just kept the shell in some dark corner of the palace. It was like asking a guest to cart away all the urine and feces he’d excreted during his visit—a spiteful and ugly thing to do. No, it was impossible for me to imagine Princess Oto, with her smile of Divine Resignation, scheming against her man like some battle-axe from the tenements. I just didn’t get it. I pondered this issue for a long time, and only recently do I feel that I’ve begun to understand. Our mistake is that we consider what happened to Urashima to have been a tragedy, a great misfortune. But not even the picture books, when depicting the three-hundred-year-old Taro, show him looking terribly unhappy.

  In the blink of an eye,

  he became a white-haired old man.

  That’s how it ends. We worldly folk, on hearing this, are the ones who blindly pass judgment. “The poor fellow!” we say, or perhaps, “What a fool!” But for Urashima, suddenly becoming three hundred years old was most decidedly not a misfortune. Had he found salvation in a tiny star of hope, I must say that it would have seemed to me a childish and artificial ending. Urashima was saved by the transformative puff of smoke itself. There’s no need for anything to be stuck to the bottom of the shell. Allow me to put it this way:

  Time and tide are man’s salvation.

  Oblivion is man’s salvation.

  It’s possible to view Princess Oto’s gift as the ultimate expression of the Dragon Palace’s exquisite and noble hospitality. Isn’t it said that memories only grow more beautiful with time? As for the unleashing of those three hundred years, that too had been entrusted to Urashima’s own emotional state. He was being granted unlimited license even now that he was back on land. If he hadn’t despaired, he wouldn’t have turned to the shell. It was only to be opened if he simply couldn’t think of anything else to do. Once it was opened, poof!—three hundred years and instant oblivion. I won’t belabor the point any further. This is the sort of profound compassion that permeates Japanese fairy tales.

  It’s said that Urashima Taro lived another ten years as a happy old man.

  Click-Clack Mountain

  The rabbit in the story of Click-Clack Mountain is a young female, and the tanuki badger she so thoroughly destroys is an unattractive male who’s madly in love with her. There’s no doubt in my mind that these are the true facts of the case.

  The incident is said to have occurred in the province of Koshu, in the hills behind what is now the town of Funazu, on the shore of Lake Kawaguchi (one of the Five Lakes of Mount Fuji). There is a rowdy, rough-and-ready side to human nature in Koshu, and perhaps that’s why this tale is somewhat more hard-boiled than other Japanese children’s stories. It’s steeped in cruelty right from the start. I mean, “grandmother stew”? It’s downright gruesome. There’s no way to make an outrage like that seem comical or witty. Let’s face it: the tanuki pulled a monstrous trick. Once we find out that the old woman’s bones have been scattered beneath the floorboards, we know we’ve entered a realm of grisliest darkness.

  As so-called children’s literature, therefore, I’m afraid the original tale must accept its current ignominious fate of being banned from sale. Contemporary picture books of Click-Clack Mountain seem, wisely, to leave it at the tanuki merely injuring Obaa-san and fleeing. That prevents the books being banned, which is all well and good, but now the revenge the rabbit exacts upon the tanuki seems excessive; and, in any case, the rabbit’s methods have nothing in common with the noble tradition of cutting down one’s enemy in a gallant and straightforward manner. No, it’s burn him half to death, torment and tease him, and finally send him gurgling to the lake bottom in a dissolving boat of mud. It’s all about deception, from start to finish. This is hardly a technique sanctioned by Bushido, our nation’s Way of the Warrior. If the tanuki has actually tricked Ojii-san into eating a stew containing the flesh of his own murdered wife, then he is guilty of a loathsome crime and we are less outraged at the torture to which he is subsequently subjected. But to have the tanuki merely injure the old woman—albeit out of consideration for the effect on impressionable young minds, not to mention the fear of being banned from sale—is to make the pain and humiliation meted out to him, culminating in that inglorious death by drowning, seem more than a bit unjust.

  This tanuki badger had been living a leisurely life in the mountains, a mischievous but fundamentally harmless moocher and ne’er-do-well,
when he was captured by the old man. Facing a hopeless situation and on the verge of being made into tanuki stew, he writhed in agony as he racked his brains for a way out and at last resorted to tricking the old woman in order to save his own skin. Let us be clear: there can be no excuse for the heinous grandmother stew scheme, and no punishment could be too severe for its perpetrator. But if the tanuki merely scratched the old woman, injuring her, as in the picture books nowadays, the sin seems far less unforgivable. The tanuki, after all, was fighting for his life and so focused on what might be called justifiable self-defense that perhaps he injured the old woman without even intending to do so. I was in the bomb shelter reading Click-Clack Mountain, the picture book, to our five-year-old daughter, who has the misfortune of resembling her father not only physically but intellectually, when, to my surprise, she said, “The poor tanuki!”

  Granted, this use of the adjective “poor” is something she’s learned just recently and uses quite indiscriminately. Poor this, poor little that. On this particular occasion, she was using it as a transparent ploy to affirm an emotional bond with her sentimental pushover of a mother. Furthermore, it’s possible that, on accompanying her father to the nearby Inokashira Zoo recently and seeing the band of tanuki badgers bustling tirelessly about in their cage there, the child had become convinced that these creatures are worthy objects of our affection. It may be that her sympathy for the tanuki in Click-Clack Mountain was based on nothing more complicated than that, but in any event, the judgment of a pint-sized partisan in my household is nothing we need take too seriously. Her reasoning lacks solid foundation. The impetus behind her sympathy is unclear and her opinion therefore scarcely deserving of our attention. Irresponsible though her remark may have been, however, I couldn’t help but think she had a point. The rabbit’s revenge was too extreme. One can always somehow explain it away to a child this small, but wouldn’t an older child, already educated in the ethics of Bushido and the square fight, consider the rabbit’s methods “dirty,” to say the least? Hmm, the fool of a father says to himself and furrows his brow. This is a serious problem.