Free Otogizoshi: The Fairy Tale Book of Dazai Osamu (Translated) by Dazaï Osamu Page A

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