“’Sno fun, eh?”
“’Sno time for bad puns. I’ll tell you, though, I never could get enthusiastic about these send-offs. All I can do is sigh, and anything I think of to say sounds so empty. I just want to get to goodbye and get it over with.”
“So you feel sad too?” Urashima is touched. “Well, allow me to express my gratitude for all you’ve done for me. I mean that.”
The tortoise doesn’t reply but jiggles his shell as if to brush off the sentiment and continues paddling onward and upward.
“I guess she’s back down there now amusing herself all alone.” A disconsolate sigh escapes Urashima’s lips. “She gave me this beautiful shell. It’s not something to eat, is it?”
The tortoise guffaws.
“It didn’t take you long down there to become a real pig, did it? No, the shell isn’t for eating. There may be something inside it. I’m not sure.”
Let us pause here for a moment. It would be easy to interpret the tortoise’s casual remark as a sinister appeal to human curiosity, made much in the spirit of the serpent of Eden. Perhaps, one thinks, it is simply the nature of cold-blooded creatures to pull such tricks. But no. To see the tortoise’s words in this way would be to do the good fellow a great disservice. Didn’t he himself once insist that he was “a genuine Japanese tortoise” and not to be compared with the serpent in the Garden? What reason have we to disbelieve him? Judging from his attitude toward Urashima up to this point, one must conclude that the tortoise scarcely seems the sort to whisper seductively while secretly plotting destruction. In fact, he seems quite the opposite of a deceptive schemer—he is, rather, as open as a carp streamer in the winds of May. In other words, he harbors no evil intentions. So I, at least, prefer to believe.
“But you might be better off not opening that shell,” he goes on. “It’s likely to contain, at the very least, the spirit energy of the Dragon Palace. Released on land, it could induce strange, mirage-like visions—or even madness. Then again, for all I know, the tides might rise in a surge and flood the earth. Let’s just say that I don’t think anything good could come of releasing whatever’s inside.”
There’s no nonsense in the tortoise’s voice, and Urashima is convinced of his sincerity.
“Perhaps you’re right. In any case, the noble atmosphere of the Dragon Palace could only be defiled by the coarse and brutish air of earth. It might even cause an explosion of some sort. I’ll store the shell at home, unopened, and treasure it as a family heirloom.”
They’ve now reached the surface of the sea. The sunlight is blindingly bright, but Urashima can see the beach of his old hometown. He can scarcely wait to run home, call his mother and father and sister and brother and all the servants together, and regale them with a detailed account of his visit to the Dragon Palace, filling them in on his newly acquired knowledge. Adventure is the power to believe. The customs of this world are just mean-spirited games of Monkey See, Monkey Do. Orthodoxy is merely another name for the commonplace. The ultimate refinement is the state of Divine Resignation, which is by no means to be confused with just giving up. There’s no caviling criticism in the Dragon Palace, only an eternal smile of acceptance. You’re given unlimited license. Do you understand? The guest is completely forgotten about! Ah, how could you understand? And if that stark realist of a brother of his displays even a hint of disbelief, all Urashima will have to do to squelch him is to thrust that beautiful souvenir from the palace in front of his nose.
He’s so worked up that as soon as they reach shore he leaps from the tortoise’s back and runs for home, forgetting even to bid his ride farewell, but...
What happened to the village?
What happened to the house?
Nothing to see but empty fields.
No people! No roads!
And the only sound was the wind in the pines.
That’s how the story goes. After much bewilderment and despair, Urashima decides to pry open the shell. But, again, I
don’t feel that the tortoise bears any responsibility for that. This weakness of human beings—the psychology that makes us particularly curious about what’s inside something we’re told we mustn’t open—is also treated in Greek mythology, with the story of Pandora’s box. But Pandora was the victim of a revenge scheme cooked up by the gods. They announced a prohibition on opening the box because they craftily foresaw that her curosity would get the better of her. Our good tortoise, on the other hand, was simply being considerate when he warned Urashima. I think it’s safe to trust him on this, if only because he uttered his warning with such uncharacteristic earnestness. The tortoise was an honest fellow.
But, although I can confidently attest that the tortoise is not to blame, we’re left with another baffling question. When Urashima opens his gift, white smoke rises up from inside and he himself is instantly transformed into a three-hundred-year-old man. And that’s how the story ends: he shouldn’t have opened the shell after all—just look what happened to the poor fellow! I, however, am deeply suspicious of this ending. Does it not imply that Princess Oto’s gift was a device for exacting revenge or meting out punishment, just like Pandora’s box? Did the princess—even as she smiled in noble silence and granted unlimited license—secretly harbor a dark, sadistic side and a desire to punish Urashima for his selfish ways? Surely not, but why then would Princess Oto, the ultimate in refinement, give her guest such an incomprehensible gift?
From Pandora’s box, all the malign hobgoblins known to man—disease, fear, enmity, grief, suspicion, jealousy, wrath, hatred, execration, impatience, remorse, cravenness, avarice, sloth, violence, and what have you—arose in a swarm like flying ants and dispersed to lodge and thrive in every corner of the earth. But when Pandora hung her head, aghast at what she’d done, it’s said that she discovered, stuck to the bottom of the box, a tiny, starlike jewel. And written on the jewel was, of all things, the word hope. At this, it’s said, a hint of color returned to Pandora’s pallid cheeks. And ever since then, thanks to this “hope,” human beings have been able to summon the courage to endure the tribulations visited upon them by the aforementioned hobgoblins.
Compared to such a box, Urashima’s souvenir of the Dragon Palace has no charm or appeal whatsoever. All it contains is smoke and an instant ticket to extreme old age. Even if a tiny star of hope had remained at the bottom of the seashell, Urashima was now three hundred years old. To give hope to a tercentenarian would be little more than a cruel joke. Hope is useless to him now. How about slipping him a little of that Divine Resignation? Then again, any man three centuries old is going to be resigned already, whether or not you bestow such an affected keepsake upon him. In the end, there’s nothing you can do to mitigate what has happened. No way to save Urashima. Look at it any way you like, this would seem to have been a singularly ghastly gift. But we can’t just throw in the sponge here. What if Westerners were to get wind of this and run around claiming that Japan’s fairy tales are more brutal or gruesome than their darling Greek myths? That would be too mortifying for words. In order to avoid dishonoring the fabled Dragon Palace, therefore, I am determined to find an exalted meaning behind that puzzling gift.
It may be true that a few days in the Dragon Palace are equivalent to a few centuries on land, but why was it necessary to bundle up all the time that had dripped past and give it to Urashima to carry home with him? If he had simply been transformed into a white-haired old man the moment he set foot on land, one could appreciate the logic. But if, in her mercy, Princess Oto had wanted Urashima to remain a young man forever, why go to the trouble of giving him a gift too volatile to be opened? She could have just kept the shell in some dark corner of the palace. It was like asking a guest to cart away all the urine and feces he’d excreted during his visit—a spiteful and ugly thing to do. No, it was impossible for me to imagine Princess Oto, with her smile of Divine Resignation, scheming against her man like some battle-axe from the tenements. I just didn’t get it. I pondered this issue for a long time, and only recently do I feel that I’ve begun to understand. Our mistake is that we consider what happened to Urashima to have been a tragedy, a great misfortune. But not even the picture books, when depicting the three-hundred-year-old Taro, show him looking terribly unhappy.
In the blink of an eye,
he became a white-haired old man.
That’s how it ends. We worldly folk, on hearing this, are the ones who blindly pass judgment. “The poor fellow!” we say, or perhaps, “What a fool!” But for Urashima, suddenly becoming three hundred years old was most decidedly not a misfortune. Had he found salvation in a tiny star of hope, I must say that it would have seemed to me a childish and artificial ending. Urashima was saved by the transformative puff of smoke itself. There’s no need for anything to be stuck to the bottom of the shell. Allow me to put it this way:
Time and tide are man’s salvation.
Oblivion is man’s salvation.
It’s possible to view Princess Oto’s gift as the ultimate expression of the Dragon Palace’s exquisite and noble hospitality. Isn’t it said that memories only grow more beautiful with time? As for the unleashing of those three hundred years, that too had been entrusted to Urashima’s own emotional state. He was being granted unlimited license even now that he was back on land. If he hadn’t despaired, he wouldn’t have turned to the shell. It was only to be opened if he simply couldn’t think of anything else to do. Once it was opened, poof!—three hundred years and instant oblivion. I won’t belabor the point any further. This is the sort of profound compassion that permeates Japanese fairy tales.