Urashima Taro

Long ago, in a fishing village on the coast of Japan, there lived a kind young fisherman named Urashima Taro. One evening, walking home along the beach, he came upon a group of children poking and teasing a small sea turtle they had caught. Taro asked them to stop, and when they would not, he traded them a few coins for the turtle and carried it gently back down to the water’s edge, setting it free.

The turtle swam a slow circle, as if bowing to him, and disappeared beneath the waves. Taro thought no more of it, until the next morning, when he was out fishing in his little boat and a great turtle, far larger than the one he had saved, rose beside him and spoke. It said that the Dragon King’s daughter, Princess Otohime, had heard what he had done and wished to thank him herself, and it offered to carry him down to her palace beneath the sea.

The palace under the sea

Taro climbed onto the great turtle’s back, and together they sank slowly beneath the waves, down through water that grew calmer and clearer the deeper they went, until they came to a palace built of coral and pearl, with gates of pale green jade. Princess Otohime herself came out to greet him, more beautiful than anyone he had ever seen, and led him inside to thank him for his kindness to the little turtle, who had been one of her own attendants.

Taro stayed at the palace as an honoured guest. Fish in bright colours danced for him in the courtyards, and from the palace windows he could see, all at once, the cherry blossoms of spring, the green of summer, the red leaves of autumn, and snow falling somewhere in the distance, as though every season lived there together. He told himself he would stay only a few days, and every day felt so much like the one before that he lost count of how many had actually passed.

The box

In time, Taro found himself thinking of his old mother, and the village, and the little boat he had left pulled up on the sand, and he told the princess he must go home. Otohime was sorry to see him go, but she did not try to keep him. She gave him a small lacquered box tied with a silk cord, and she asked him to promise never to open it, whatever happened, if he wished to be able to return to her one day. Taro promised, and the great turtle carried him back up through the water to the beach he had left.

But the village Taro found waiting for him was not the one he remembered. The path to his mother’s house led to an empty field. No one he passed knew his name, and when he finally found someone old enough to remember a fisherman called Urashima Taro, the old man told him that a young man by that name had vanished at sea some three hundred years before, and had never been seen again.

The years

Taro sat down on the sand, holding the little box, and understood at last what Otohime’s palace had cost him without his noticing: every one of those three hundred years had been waiting quietly for him all along, and the only thing keeping them from him had been her warning. Without quite deciding to, his hands untied the silk cord, and a soft white mist rose out of the box and drifted away over the water.

In that same moment, Taro’s hair turned white, his back bent, and his hands grew thin and lined, as all the years he had missed settled gently over him at once. He was an old man now, sitting alone on the beach where he had once freed a small green turtle. But he found, to his own surprise, that he was not afraid, and that some part of him, the part that remembered the palace, and the princess, and the turtle bowing to him in the shallow water, stayed exactly as young as it had always been, for as long as he lived.

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Okinawan Lullaby

Play this softly while you read Urashima Taro aloud: a traditional lullaby from Okinawa, the chain of islands where Japan meets the sea.

See the lyrics & meaning →