The Boy Who Drew Cats and Other Japanese Fairy Tales (5 page)

L
ONG, LONG ago there lived somewhere among the mountains of Japan a poor woodcutter and his wife. They were very old, and had no children. Every day the husband went alone to the forest to cut wood, while the wife sat weaving at home.

One day the old man went further into the forest than was his custom, to seek a certain kind of wood; and he suddenly found himself at the edge of a little spring he had never seen before. The water was strangely clear and cold, and he was thirsty; for the day was hot, and he had been working hard. So he doffed his huge straw-hat, knelt down, and took a long drink.

That water seemed to refresh him in a most extraordinary way. Then he caught sight of his own face in the spring, and started back. It was certainly his own face, but not at all as he was accustomed to see it in the bronze mirror at home. It was the face of a very young man! He could not believe his eyes. He put up both hands to his head which had been quite bald only a moment before, when he had wiped it with the little blue towel he always carried with him. But now it was covered with thick black hair. And his face had become smooth as a boy's: every wrinkle was gone. At the same moment he discovered himself full of new strength. He stared in astonishment at the limbs that had been so long withered by age: they were now shapely and hard with dense young muscle. Unknowingly he had drunk of the Fountain of Youth; and that draught had transformed him.

He caught sight of his own youthful face in the spring,
and could not believe his eyes.

First he leaped high and shouted for joy;—then he ran home faster than he had ever run before in his life. When he entered his house his wife was frightened;—because she took him for a stranger; and when he told her the wonder, she could not at once believe him. But after a long time he was able to convince her that the young man she now saw before her was really her husband; and he told her where the spring was, and asked her to go there with him.

Then she said:—“You have become so handsome and so young that you cannot continue to love an old woman;—so I must drink some of that water immediately. But it will never do for both of us to be away from the house at the same time. Do you wait here, while I go.” And she ran to the woods all by herself.

She found the spring and knelt down, and began to drink. Oh! how cool and sweet that water was! She drank and drank and drank, and stopped for breath only to begin again.

Her husband waited for her impatiently;—he expected to see her come back changed into a pretty slender girl. But she did not come back at all. He got anxious, shut up the house, and went to look for her.

When he reached the spring, he could not see her. He was just on the point of returning when he heard a little wail in the high grass near the spring. He searched there and discovered his wife's clothes and a baby,—a very small baby, perhaps six months old.

For the old woman had drunk too deeply of the magical water; she had drunk herself far back beyond the time of youth into the period of speechless infancy.

He took up the child in his arms. It looked at him in a sad wondering way. He carried it home,—murmuring to it,—thinking strange melancholy thoughts.

N
OW, THERE were once eighty-one brothers, who were Princes in the land. They were all jealous of one another, each one wishing to be King, to rule over the others, and over the whole Kingdom. Besides this, each one wanted to marry the same Princess. She was the Princess of Yakami in Inaba.

At last they made up their minds that they would go together to Inaba, and each one try to persuade the Princess to marry him. Although eighty of these brothers were jealous of one another, yet they all agreed in hating, and being unkind to the eighty-first, who was good and gentle, and did not like their rough, quarrelsome ways. When they set out upon their journey, they made the poor eighty-first brother walk behind them, and carry the bag, just as if he had been their servant, although he was their own brother, and as much a Prince as any of them all.

By and by, the eighty Princes came to Cape Keta, and there they found a poor hare, with all his fur plucked out, lying down very sick and miserable. The eighty Princes said to the hare:

“We will tell you what you should do. Go and bathe in the sea water, and then lie down on the slope of a high mountain, and let the wind blow upon you. That will soon make your fur grow, we promise you.”

So the poor hare believed them, and went and bathed in the sea, and afterwards lay down in the sun and the wind to dry. But, as the salt water dried, the skin of his body all cracked and split with the sun and the wind, so that he was in terrible pain, and lay there crying, in a much worse state than he was before.

Now the eighty-first brother was a long way behind the others, because he had the luggage to carry, but at last he came up staggering under the weight of the heavy bag. When he saw the hare he asked:

When he saw the hare he asked: “Why are you lying there crying?”

“Why are you lying there crying?”

“Oh dear!” said the hare, “just stop a moment and I will tell you all my story. I was in the island of Oki, and I wanted to cross over to this land. I didn't know how to get over, but at last I hit upon a plan. I said to the crocodiles:

“‘Let us count how many crocodiles there are in the sea, and how many hares there are in the land. And now to begin with the crocodiles. Come, every one of you, and lie down in a row, across from this island to Cape Keta, then I will step upon each one, and count you as I run across. When I have finished counting you, we can count the hares, and then we shall know whether there are most hares, or most crocodiles.'

“The crocodiles came and lay down in a row. Then I stepped on them and counted them as I ran across, and was just going to jump on shore, when I laughed and said, ‘You silly crocodiles, I don't care how many of you there are. I only wanted a bridge to get across by.' Oh! why did I boast until I was safe on dry land? For the last crocodile, the one which lay at the very end of the row, seized me, and plucked off all my fur.”

“And serve you right too, for being so tricky,” said the eighty-first brother. “However, go on with your story.”

“As I was lying here crying,” continued the hare, “the eighty Princes who went by before you, told me to bathe in salt water, and lie down in the wind. I did as they told me, but I am ten times worse than before, and my whole body is smarting and sore.”

Then the eighty-first brother said to the hare, “Go quickly now to the river, it is quite near. Wash yourself well with the fresh water, then take the pollen of the sedges growing on the river bank, spread it about on the ground, and roll among it; if you do this, your skin will heal, and your fur grow again.”

So the hare did as he was told; and this time he was quite cured, and his fur grew thicker than ever.

Then the hare said to the eighty-first brother, “As for those eighty Princes, your brothers, they shall not get the Princess of Inaba. Although you carry the bag, yet your Highness shall at last get both the princess and the country.”

Which things came to pass, for the Princess would have nothing to do with those eighty bad brothers, but chose the eighty-first who was kind and good. Then he was made King of the country, and lived happily all his life.

O
NCE UPON a time there was a brave warrior, called My Lord Bag-o'-Rice, who spent all his time in waging war against the King's enemies.

One day, when he had sallied forth to seek adventures, he came to an immensely long bridge, spanning a river just at the place where it flowed out of a fine lake. When he set foot on this bridge, he saw that a Serpent twenty feet long was lying there basking in the sun, in such a way that he could not cross the bridge without treading on it.

Most men would have taken to their heels at so frightful a sight. But My Lord Bag-o'-Rice was not to be daunted. He simply walked right ahead,—squash, scrunch, over the Serpent's body.

Instantly the Serpent turned into a tiny Dwarf, who, humbly bowing the knee, and knocking the planks of the bridge three times with his head in token of respect, said: “My Lord! you are a man, you are! For many a weary day have I lain here, waiting for one who should avenge me on my enemy. But all who saw me were cowards, and ran away. You will avenge me, will you not? I live at the bottom of this lake, and my enemy is a Centipede who dwells at the top of yonder mountain. Come along with me, I beseech you. If you help me not, I am undone.”

The Warrior was delighted at having found such an adventure as this. He willingly followed the Dwarf to his summer-house beneath the waters of the lake. It was all curiously built of coral and metal sprays in the shape of sea-weed and other water-plants, with freshwater crabs as big as men, and water-monkeys, and newts, and tadpoles as servants and bodyguards. When they had rested awhile, dinner was brought in on trays shaped like the leaves of water-lilies. The dishes were watercress leaves,—not real ones, but much more beautiful than real ones; for they were of water-green porcelain with a shimmer of gold; and the chop-sticks were of beautiful petrified wood like black ivory. As for the wine in the cups, it
looked
like water; but, as it
tasted
all right, what did its looks signify?

Well, there they were, feasting and singing; and the Dwarf had just pledged the Warrior in a goblet of hot steaming wine, when thud! thud! thud! like the tramp of an army, the fearful monster of whom the Dwarf had spoken was heard approaching. It sounded as if a continent were in motion; and on either side there seemed to be a row of a thousand men with lanterns. But the Warrior was able to make out, as the danger drew nearer, that all this fuss was made by a single creature, an enormous Centipede over a mile long; and that what had seemed like men with lanterns on either side of it, were in reality its own feet, of which it had exactly one thousand on each side of its body, all of them glistening and glinting with the sticky poison that oozed out of every pore.

There was no time to be lost. The Centipede was already half-way down the mountain. So the Warrior snatched up his bow, a bow so big and heavy that it would have taken five ordinary men to pull it,—fitted an arrow into the bow-notch, and let fly.

He was not one ever to miss his aim. The arrow struck right in the middle of the monster's forehead. But alas! it rebounded as if that forehead had been made of brass.

A second time did the Warrior take his bow and shoot. A second time did the arrow strike and rebound; and now the dreadful creature was down to the water's edge, and would soon pollute the lake with its filthy poison. Said the Warrior to himself: “Nothing kills Centipedes so surely as human spittle.” And with these words, he spat on to the tip of the only arrow that remained to him (for there had been but three in his quiver). This time again the arrow hit the Centipede right in the middle of its forehead. But instead of rebounding, it went right in and came out again at the back of the creature's head, so that the Centipede fell down dead, shaking the whole country-side like an earthquake, and the poisonous light on its two thousand feet darkening to a dull glare like that of the twilight of a stormy day.

A second time did the Warrior take his bow and shoot.

Then the Warrior found himself wafted back to his own castle; and round him stood a row of presents, on each of which were inscribed the words “From your grateful dwarf.” One of these presents was a large bronze bell, which the Warrior, who was a religious man as well as a brave one, hung up in the temple that contained the tombs of his ancestors. The second was a sword, which enabled him ever after to gain the victory over all his enemies. The third was a suit of armor which no arrow could penetrate. The fourth was a roll of silk, which never grew smaller, though he cut off large pieces from time to time to make himself a new court dress.

The fifth was a bag of rice, which, though he took from it day after day for meals for himself, his family, and his trusty retainers, never got exhausted as long as he lived.

And it was from this fifth and last present that he took his name and title of “My Lord Bag-o'-Rice”; for all the people thought that there was nothing stranger in the whole world than this wonderful bag, which made its owner such a rich and happy man.