The Tale of Urashima Taro

At a Glance

• Central figures: Urashima Taro, a young fisherman; Otohime, the daughter of the Sea King Ryujin; and the turtle who serves as messenger between worlds.
• Setting: A coastal village in Japan and the underwater Dragon Palace, Ryugu-jo, realm of the Sea King Ryujin; drawn from Japanese folklore.
• The turn: After spending what feels like days at the Dragon Palace, Urashima returns home to find that centuries have passed. In despair, he opens the tamatebako - the lacquered box Otohime warned him never to open.
• The outcome: The box releases a white cloud that ages Urashima instantly; he collapses and disappears, the years he had escaped catching him all at once.
• The legacy: The story left behind the image of the tamatebako as a vessel for lost time - and Urashima himself, who returned to find nothing of his world remaining.

A fisherman walking the beach saw a turtle being tormented by children. He scattered them and put the turtle back in the water. It is the kind of unremarkable act of decency that a person forgets by evening. Urashima Taro did not think much of it. Then the turtle came back.

It surfaced beside his boat a few days later while he was out fishing, and it spoke. It told him it was no ordinary sea creature but a messenger of Ryugu-jo, the Dragon Palace beneath the waves - home of the Sea King Ryujin. Out of gratitude, it said, the palace wished to receive him. Urashima looked out at the sea, then back at the turtle. He accepted. He climbed onto its shell and the water closed over his head.

The Coral Palace

Nothing he had seen above the surface prepared him for it. Ryugu-jo was built of coral and encrusted with jewels, and the light that moved through it was not the light he knew - it bent and shifted, every color at once. Ryujin the Sea King welcomed him. But it was Otohime, Ryujin’s daughter, who showed him the palace.

She led him through gardens where pearls grew like fruit and fish moved in bright schools through the open halls. Sea creatures danced in the water around them. There was food and music and a stillness to the hours that felt nothing like the tired weight of evening after a day’s fishing. Urashima stayed. Days became weeks. He felt no urgency; there was nothing here that demanded anything of him, and the beauty of the place was such that the thought of leaving seemed strange and distant.

The Gift He Should Not Open

When the thought of home finally reached him - his village, the shore, the smell of the sea from land rather than below it - it arrived with the force of something long suppressed. He had been a guest long enough. He told Otohime he wished to return.

She did not try to stop him. She looked at him for a moment, then took out a box - small, lacquered, elaborately made. The tamatebako, she called it. She pressed it into his hands and told him to take it, and then told him, clearly, that he must never open it. Whatever happened after he surfaced, the box was to remain closed.

He promised. The turtle carried him back up through the water.

The Village That No Longer Knew His Name

He came ashore where his village had been. The shore was familiar in its shape but the village itself was wrong. The houses were different. The faces were those of strangers. He asked about his family and received only puzzled looks. He gave his own name and watched people’s expressions - not recognition, but something more unsettling. A few had heard the name, distantly. A very old man thought his grandfather’s grandfather had spoken of a fisherman called Urashima Taro. One who had gone out on the water and never returned.

He stood there on the shore, the tamatebako under his arm. Three days at the Dragon Palace. Three hundred years on land. His mother and father were centuries dead. Everything he had known - the faces, the boats pulled up on the beach, the particular sound the village made at dusk - all of it was gone so completely there was nothing left to mourn in pieces. It had to be mourned all at once.

The White Cloud

He held the box for a long time before he opened it. He knew the promise he had made. He opened it anyway.

White smoke poured out and wrapped around him. It did not burn or strike him down. It simply aged him - rapidly, all at once, three hundred years of time taking what was owed. His hair went white. His skin drew tight and papery over his hands. His legs failed. The youth that the Dragon Palace had held in suspension for him, that he had carried sealed in lacquer under his arm, was gone.

Urashima Taro collapsed on the beach. The account of what happened next varies. Some say he died there. Some say he simply disappeared. What all versions agree on is that he was gone - and that all he left behind was the empty tamatebako and the story of the fisherman who had been kind to a turtle, and had spent three days in a palace beneath the sea, and had come home to find three centuries waiting for him in a small wooden box.

The shore remained. The sea remained. The turtle did not come back.