I am a monk, passing the summer
at Naruto in Awa....
With that, he turns ever so slowly, then once again freezes in position, glaring up at the moon.
The Oni were puzzled and frightened.
One by one they jumped up and fled
back into the forest.
“Wait a moment!” the old gentleman shrieks, and chases after them. “You can’t leave me now!”
“Run! Run! It’s Shoki, Queller of Demons!”
“No, no! That’s not who I am!” The old gentleman finally catches up to and prostrates himself before one of the Oni, clinging to its leg. “Please, I beg of you! My wen!”
“What? The wen?” The ogre, confused by all the excitement, misunderstands him. “That’s a treasure we were holding for the other old man, but—all right, you can have it. But no more dancing like that, please! You ruined a perfectly good drunk, and now we’ve got to find a new spot and start all over. Let go of me! Hey, somebody give this crazy old man that wen from the other night! He says he wants it!”
The Oni attached the other wen
to his right cheek.
Now the old man had two wens,
one dangling from each side of his face.
How heavy they looked as he
trudged back to the village!
What a sad ending. You have to feel sorry for the second old man. Most of our children’s stories end with the perpetrators of evil deeds getting what’s coming to them, but this old gentleman did nothing wrong. He tried to perform a dance that, owing to a case of nerves, turned out rather disturbingly weird, but that’s the extent of his crime. Nor was anyone in his family particularly evil. And the same can be said for the sake-loving Ojii-san and his family, and for the Oni of Mount Tsurugi as well. None of them did anything wrong. And yet, although not a single instance of wrongdoing occurs in the story, people end up unhappy.
It’s difficult, therefore, to extract from this tale of the stolen wen a moral lesson for daily life. But were an indignant reader to demand to know why, in that case, I even bothered to write the damn thing, I would have no choice but to reply as follows: It’s a tragicomedy of character. At issue here is an undercurrent that winds through the very heart of human existence.
Urashima-san
Apparently a man named Urashima Taro actually lived once, long ago, in a place called Mizunoe, on the Tango Peninsula in what is now northern Kyoto Prefecture. They tell me you can still find a shrine dedicated to Taro there, in a poor little village on the coast. I’ve never visited the place myself, although I understand it’s about as desolate a stretch of beach as you’re likely to find.
At any rate, that’s where our Urashima Taro resides. He doesn’t live alone, of course, but with his mother and father. Also a younger brother and sister. Not to mention a large number of servants. He is, you see, the eldest son of an old and highly respected family. Now, eldest sons of respected families have had, from ancient times to our own, a certain characteristic in common: namely, a sense of style. Some might describe this stylishness favorably, as refinement, and others less favorably, as prodigality. But in Taro’s case the prodigality, if it can be so called, was of a sort entirely distinct from that associated with wine and women and what have you. Among second and third sons one often finds that variety of prodigal who overindulges in liquor and pursues women of lowly birth, muddying his own family’s name in the process, but the number one son is generally quite innocent of such abominable behavior. Because he is responsible for the wealth and property accumulated by his ancestors, the first-born male comes naturally to acquire a certain steadfast stodginess and to conduct himself in an impeccably proper and genteel manner. Rather than the intense floozies-and-booze version favored by his younger brothers, therefore, the eldest son’s prodigality is more of a sideline, a series of frivolous diversions. All he asks of these diversions, furthermore, is that they cement his reputation for possessing the taste and gentility that befit his station in life.
“Dear brother, you just don’t have any sense of adventure,” the younger sister, an impertinent thing of sixteen, tells him one day. “That’s what’s wrong with you.”
“No, that’s not it,” their coarse and rebellious eighteen-year-old brother chimes in. “He’s too pretty, is what it is.”
The younger brother is dark-complected and strikingly ugly.
But Urashima Taro never loses his temper, even when tested with such uninhibited criticism from his younger siblings. “To allow one’s curiosity to get the better of one is a sort of adventure,” he tells them. “And to control one’s curiosity is also a species of adventure. Both are risky propositions. There is a thing called destiny to which all men are subject.”
Exactly what he means by these words is anyone’s guess, but after pronouncing them with a calm, composed, and enlightened air, he clasps his hands behind his back and strolls out to the seashore. There, ambling aimlessly along the beach, he mutters fragments of refined and elegant poetry.
Scattered by the wind
like the tattered ends
of a worn rush mat—
the fishing boats!