Otogizōshi: The Fairy Tale Book of Dazai Osamu Read online

  “Kindness, for people like you, is nothing more than a minor diversion. A little titillation. You rescued me because I’m a tortoise. You put up money because they were children. But a sickly beggar and rowdy fishermen? That would be another story altogether. To have the smelly wind of real life blowing in your face would be more than you could bear. That’s what we call being a snob, Urashima-san.

  “Hey, you’re not angry, are you? I love you, after all—or don’t you want to hear that? It’s a delicate situation. You people with lofty destinies seem to think it’s a disgrace to be admired even by people of lowly birth, let alone a tortoise. To be loved by a tortoise must be repulsive to you. But, look, have a heart. Love and hate aren’t based on logic, after all. It’s not because you rescued me that I love you, and it’s not because you’re a man of refinement. I just do, that’s all. And it’s because I love you that I have this urge to tease you. It’s how we cold-blooded creatures express our love. Well, we do have snakes in the family, so I guess I can’t blame you for not trusting me. But I’m not the serpent from the Garden of Eden, for heaven’s sake, I’m a genuine Japanese tortoise. I’m not scheming to entice you to the Dragon Palace so I can cause your downfall. Try to understand my feelings. I just want to play with you. I’d like us to have some fun together in a very special place.

  “You won’t find people disturbing the peace by criticizing one another down there. Life in the Dragon Palace is gentle, leisurely, live-and-let-live. The place is built for enjoyment. Me, I can live on land or under the sea, so I’ve had a chance to compare the two, and I’ll tell you, life up here is too full of stress. Everyone’s forever criticizing everyone else. When someone opens his mouth on land it’s either to say something nasty about others or to praise himself. It gets tiresome fast. But I’ve been up on land like this so many times that I too have become tainted. I’ve learned to engage in the same sort of snobbish one-upsmanship that’s so popular here. It’s bad, I know, but there’s something habit-forming about finding fault with others, and now life in the Dragon Palace sometimes seems dull to me. Civilization is a real monkey on my back, I’ll tell you. I no longer know if I’m a creature of the sea or the land. I’m somewhere in between, I guess, like the bat—is it a bird or a beast?—and it’s getting harder and harder for me to stay put in my own home. This much I can guarantee you, though: the Dragon Palace is the ultimate place to relax and have fun in. Trust me. It’s a world of singing, dancing, delectable food, and wonderful wine. Perfect for a discriminating man like yourself. After all, aren’t you the one who was just complaining about criticism? It doesn’t exist in the Dragon Palace.”

  The tortoise’s rather astounding garrulity is such that Urashima has given up even trying to interject a response, but these last few words pierce his heart.

  “Ah,” he sighs, “if only there really were such a place!”

  The tortoise glares at him.

  “You still doubt what I’m saying? I’m not lying to you, damn it! Now you’ve made me angry. Is this what all you refined gentlemen are like—wishing and pining and never acting? You make me sick.”

  Not even the meek and mild Urashima can back down from a challenge as pointed, and as barbed, as this.

  “Very well!” he says with another wry smile. “Just as you wish. I’ll climb on your back and see what happens.”

  But the tortoise is genuinely irate.

  “The way you put things really rubs me the wrong way, you know that? What do you mean, ‘and see what happens’? To climb on my back and to climb on my back and see what happens add up to exactly the same thing. In terms of sealing your fate, there’s no difference between turning right on a whim and turning right because you’ve come to some momentous resolve. Either way, it can’t be undone. Once you’ve given in to that whim, your destiny is decided. There’s no such thing as ‘seeing what happens’ in this life. To do something just to see what happens is exactly the same as just plain doing it. You gentlemen of refinement have a lot to learn about resigning yourselves to fate. You actually think you can turn back once you’ve taken a leap?”

  “All right! I’m climbing on your back because I believe you.”

  “Now you’re talking!”

  As Urashima seats himself on the tortoise’s shell it settles and expands, until it’s almost wider than he can reach across. The tortoise pushes off into the waves, rocking gently from side to side. They are perhaps two stones’ throw from shore when he issues a terse command.

  “Close your eyes.”

  Urashima obediently complies and in the next moment hears a sound like a sudden shower and feels something like a warm spring breeze, only heavier, tickling his earlobes.

  “Depth: one thousand fathoms,” the tortoise announces.

  Urashima experiences a slight nausea.

  “Is it all right if I have to throw up?” he says, his eyes still clamped shut.

  “What? You’re going to puke?” The tortoise reverts to a coarser tone of voice as he turns his head to look back. “What a revolting— My word! You’ve still got your eyes closed, like a good little boy! That’s what I love about you, young master. You may open your eyes now. Drink in the scenery and you’ll stop feeling queasy in no time.”

  He opens his eyes to a vast, hazy expanse lit with an ethereal pale green glow that casts no shadows.

  “So this... is the Dragon Palace,” he whispers dreamily.

  “Snap out of it. We’ve only descended a thousand fathoms. The Dragon Palace is ten thousand fathoms under the sea.”

  “Sheee!” Urashima’s voice is a squeak. “The sea’s deep, isn’t it?”

  “You were raised near the sea, for heaven’s sake. You sound like some ape from the mountains. Yeah, it’s deep. It’s not to be compared to the pond in your garden.”

  Ahead, behind, left, right—whichever direction Urashima looks, there is only that seemingly boundless, hazy expanse. Below him too he can see nothing but the pale green glow, and when he looks up he sees not the blue sky but an immeasurable dome of watery emerald light. Aside from their own voices, not a sound can be heard. There is only that sensation of wind, like a viscous spring breeze, blowing in his face and tickling his ears.

  He finally spots something far in the distance, above and to the right—a tiny, faint, speckled something, like a handful of scattered ashes.

  “What’s that? A cloud?”

  “You’re joking, right?” says the tortoise. “There aren’t any clouds in the ocean.”

  “What is it, then? It looks like a splash of India ink. Just dirt or something?”

  “You’re really showing your ignorance, you know that? It’s a school of sea bream.”

  “Really? It looks so small from here. How many would you say there are? Two or three hundred, maybe?”

  The tortoise laughs derisively. “Are you serious?”

  “More, then? What, two or three thousand?”

  “Get a grip on yourself, man. There are a good five or six million fish in that school.”

  “Five or six million? Are you joking?”

  “I am, yes,” the tortoise says, and grins. “It’s not a school of sea bream. It’s a sea fire. Awful lot of smoke, though. To make that much smoke, they must be burning an area about twenty times the size of Japan.”

  “Please. Fire can’t burn underwater.”

  “Think before you speak, young master. Water contains oxygen, doesn’t it? Where there’s oxygen, there’s no reason you can’t have fire.”

  “Nonsense. I’m not going to fall for such half-witted sophistry. All jokes aside—what in the world is it? That little smudge up there. Is it a school of fish after all? It certainly isn’t fire.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s a fire. Haven’t you ever wondered why the sea never overflows, in spite of the fact that all the rivers in the world empty into it constantly, day and night? If you look at it from the sea’s point of view, it’s quite a dilemma. It’s not easy to manage all that surplus water rushing
in. That’s why we have to start these fires, to dispose of the water we don’t need. Just look at it burn!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Why isn’t the smoke spreading, then? What is it really? It hasn’t moved at all since I’ve been watching, so it’s not likely to be a school of fish either. Stop your teasing and tell me what it is. Please?”

  “All right, all right. It’s the shadow of the moon.”

  “You’re pulling my leg again.”

  “No, seriously. Nothing on land casts a shadow down here, but all the heavenly bodies do, as they pass overhead. Not just the moon, but the stars and planets and everything. Down in the Dragon Palace we even have a calendar that’s made by tracing those shadows. We use it to determine the seasons. That moon’s a little past full, so today must be, what, the thirteenth?”

  The tortoise is speaking in a sincere tone of voice, and Urashima is inclined to believe him this time, but it all still seems a bit fishy somehow. He is, however, more than willing to suspend his disbelief that the one smudge on this vast pale green expanse could be the moon’s shadow, if the alternative is a monstrous school of fish or, worse, smoke from a fire. For a man of cultivated tastes the moonshadow interpretation holds a good deal of charm, and he briefly entertains a certain melancholy nostalgia.

  But now it begins to grow dark, and suddenly, along with an almost deafening roar, comes a rush of gale-force wind that nearly topples him from his seat.

  “Better close your eyes again,” the tortoise says in a no-nonsense tone. “We’ve just reached the entrance to the Dragon Palace. Deep-sea divers have come down this far, but they generally assume they’ve reached the very bottom and head back up. In fact, you’re the first human being that’s ever passed through here. Probably the last too.”

  It seems to Urashima as if the tortoise has rolled over. It’s a most peculiar sensation, as though his ride has done a half-somersault and is now upside-down and swimming upward. He clings tightly to the shell, although he doesn’t seem to be in any danger of falling off.

  “You can open your eyes now.”

  When he does so, the sensation of being upside-down vanishes. He is sitting atop the tortoise as he has been all along, and they’re still diving.

  A dim light, as of dawn, suffuses the atmosphere around them, and Urashima can make out the vague outline of an immense row of white peaks. It appears to be a mountain range of some sort, but the peaks are so symmetrical that except for their enormous size they might be artificial structures.

  “Those are mountains, right?”

  “Right.”

  “The mountains of the Dragon Palace.” Urashima’s voice is hoarse with excitement.

  “Right.” The tortoise continues diving.

  “They’re pure white. Covered with snow, are they?”

  “Wow. You people with lofty destinies think differently from the rest of us, you know that? I mean, it takes my breath away. You think it snows at the bottom of the sea, for example.”

  “Well, I’m told you have fires down here,” Urashima says, in an attempt to retaliate. “So you must have snow too. Water contains oxygen, after all.”

  “Not much connection between snow and oxygen, I’m afraid—at least, no more than between the wind and the bucket-maker. If you’re trying to bring me down a notch, you’ll have to do better than that. But then, there’s no reason to expect refined gentlemen to be much good at repartee, I suppose. Once you’ve climbed to the top, snow fun coming down—how’s that? ’Sno fun, get it? Not very funny, I guess. Better than that oxygen crack, though. Oxygendeed, what? Sorry.”

  “Be that as it may, those mountains—”

  The tortoise snorts derisively again and says, “‘Be that as it may’? I love it. Be that as it may, those mountains aren’t covered with snow. They’re mountains of pearls.”

  “Pearls?” Urashima gasps. “No, you’re lying. You couldn’t make a mountain as high as one of those even with ten or twenty thousand pearls.”

  “Ten or twenty thousand? Your stinginess is showing again, young master. In the Dragon Palace we don’t count pearls individually. We talk about ‘hills’ of pearls. Some say a hill is thirty billion pearls, but nobody’s ever really bothered to count them. Put about a million hills together and you’ve got a mountain the size of those. We have a pearl disposal problem down here, you see. After all, if you think about it, they’re just oyster poop.”

  As the tortoise is speaking, they reach the main entrance to the Dragon Palace. The palace gate, perched at the foot of one of the pearl mountains, emits a fluorescent glow but is surprisingly small. Urashima steps off the tortoise’s back and follows behind him, stooping slightly as he passes beneath the gate’s low-slung roof. Inside, it’s dim and hushed.

  “Awfully quiet, isn’t it?” he says. “Too quiet. We aren’t in Hell, are we?”

  “Get a grip on yourself, young master.” The tortoise slaps him on the back with a fin. “All royal palaces have this sort of hushed atmosphere. What did you imagine? Did you have some hackneyed vision of people dancing and singing and beating drums, as if it were a fishermen’s festival on the beach of Tango? Don’t be pathetic. I thought people like you were supposed to view quiet simplicity as the epitome of civilized taste. ‘Are we in Hell?’ he says. Shame on you. Once you get accustomed to the silence and the subdued light, you’ll be amazed to see how it comforts the heart. Watch your step, by the way. You’ll cut a pretty ridiculous figure if you slip and... What the—? You’re still wearing your sandals? Were you raised in a barn? Take them off!”

  Blushing with embarrassment, Urashima hastily removes the footwear. In his bare feet, he’s aware of an odd sliminess to the surface he’s walking on.

  “This road feels icky,” he says.

  “It’s not a road, genius, it’s a corridor. We’re already inside the palace.”

  “We are?” Startled, Urashima looks about but can’t see any walls or columns or anything of the sort. Only the dim, fathomless light wavering around him.

  “Just as there’s no snow down here, my friend,” the tortoise says in a suddenly affectionate tone, “there’s no rain either. Which means there’s no need to build those horribly confining walls and ceilings and things, the way they do on land.”

  “But the gate had a roof.”

  “To make it easier to find. Princess Oto’s chambers have walls and a roof as well, but that’s only to protect her dignity and privacy.”

  “You don’t say.” Urashima still looks baffled. “But where are her chambers? As far as I can see, it’s as lonely and desolate as Hades itself—there’s not a tree or a clump of grass to be seen.”

  “You country boys. You see a few tall buildings and bright city lights and your mouths fall open, but you don’t have the least interest in the serene, secluded beauty of a place like this. Urashima-san, that noble refinement of yours is starting to look a little suspicious. But then, I suppose it’s only to be expected of a bumpkin from the wild and rocky coast of Tango. All that talk about culture and lofty destiny—it’s enough to make an honest man break out in a cold sweat. And you claim to be steeped in the time-honored tradition of gentlemanly refinement—what a laugh! Here you’re confronted with the real thing and you turn into a driveling hick. Well, the cat’s out of the bag now. You can stop playing the gentleman.”

  Since arriving at the Dragon Palace, the tortoise’s poison tongue has only acquired an even nastier sting. Urashima is crushed.

  “But... but... I can’t see anything!” His voice is practically a sob.

  “That’s why I told you to watch your step. This isn’t a corridor like on land, you know. It’s a bridge of fish. Hundreds of millions of fish all huddled together. Be careful.”

  A chill races down Urashima’s spine, and he shoots to his tiptoes. No wonder the floor felt so slimy beneath his feet! Peering down, he can see that it does indeed consist of countless fish of every size and description, squeezed together gill to gill and all but motionless.

/>   “This is horrible!” he sputters as he minces unsteadily along. “In very bad taste, I must say. Is this what you call the serene, secluded beauty of the place—having the guest walk on the backs of fish? It’s the ultimate in vulgarity! Think of the poor fish, to begin with! If this is refinement, it’s of a variety a bit too bizarre for simple country folk like me to comprehend!”

  The opportunity to vent his resentment at having been called a hick provides a small amount of satisfaction, if only momentarily.

  “Not at all, sir,” says a tiny voice at his feet. “We come here each day to listen to Her Highness Princess Oto play the harp. This bridge of ours isn’t an expression of refinement. We’re simply entranced by the music, you see. Please feel free to walk on. We don’t feel a thing, I assure you.”

  “Oh. I see,” Urashima says with an embarrassed smile. “I thought this was meant as some sort of decorative touch to the palace environs or—”

  “That’s not all you thought,” the tortoise interrupts. “You thought Her Highness ordered the fish to do this to give a proper welcome to the young master of—”

  “See here! I did not!” Urashima protests, flustered and blushing. “Heaven knows I’m not quite so vain as all that! But, I mean, you’re the one who told me that nonsense about this being the floor of the corridor, so I just, that is, I merely thought, well, I mean, the poor fish...”