Urashima Tarō

Summary

Urashima is a fisherman of the Tango coast in western Japan, and his is the oldest surviving Japanese story of a man who married a woman of the sea, lived with her in the other world, came back and lost everything. Three eighth-century texts tell it: the Nihon shoki of 720, a poem in the Man'yōshū, the old poetry collection, and a fragment of the Tango Fudoki, the province's book of local records. The name Tarō, "eldest son", was given to him in the tales of the fifteenth century.

The Nihon shoki, under the twenty-second year of Emperor Yūryaku, says that a man of Tsutsukawa in the province of Tanba, the child of Urashima of Mizunoe, went fishing in a boat and caught a large turtle, which at once became a woman; he fell in love with her and married her, and they went down together into the sea to Mount Hōrai and saw the immortals. Then the chronicle adds: "The story is in another book". Its translator Aston notes that the Japanese gloss reads Hōrai as Tokoyo no kuni, the Eternal Land.

The fullest early telling is poem 1740 of the ninth book of the Man'yōshū, from the collection of the poet Takahashi no Mushimaro. The poet stands on the beach of Suminoe in the spring haze, watches the fishing boats rock, and remembers the old tale. Urashima of Mizunoe, proud of his catch of bonito and sea bream, did not come home for seven days and rowed on past the boundary of the sea, where he met the daughter of the sea kami. They pledged themselves, went to Tokoyo, and entered hand in hand a fine hall in the sea kami's palace, where he might have lived for ever, never growing old and never dying. But the foolish man said to his wife: I will go home a little while and speak to my father and mother, and come back tomorrow. She said: if you mean to return to Tokoyo and live with me as now, do not open this box. Back at Suminoe he looked for his house and could not find it, looked for the village and could not find it, and thought: how could my home vanish in three years, leaving not even the fence? If I open the box, perhaps everything will be as before. He opened it a little, and a white cloud came out and drifted away towards Tokoyo. He ran, shouted, waved his sleeves and rolled on the ground; his heart failed; his young skin wrinkled, his black hair turned white, his breath stopped and he died. The poet ends: here stood the house of Urashima.

In the Tango Fudoki fragment, preserved in the thirteenth-century Shaku Nihongi, the story becomes a pedigree: the fisherman is Shimako of the inlet of Mizunoe, in the village of Tsutsukawa in Yosa district, ancestor of the Kusakabe family of Tango, and the box is a tamakushige, the jewelled comb box in which a woman keeps her toilet things.

The idea the story turns on is that the other world gives a life without age or death on a single condition, and the man who wants both worlds loses both. Time there is short and here long: three years in the sea palace, and on land a village of which nothing is left, which later tales make three hundred and then seven hundred years. The box keeps what he was given: the Nipponica encyclopedia says the story most likely rests on the belief in a soul kept outside the body so that its owner cannot die, and that the box held that soul, so that when he opened it the life that held his youth went out. The marriage itself is a marriage with a woman of the other world who sets a condition that is broken, as Hoori broke his sea-born wife's condition when he looked at her giving birth.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the project's essays do not read this hero. The old name 浦島子, Urashima no ko, holds three Japanese words: 子 ko, child or lad; 島 sima, island; and 浦 ura. The last is two words in the Old Japanese lexicon: an inlet reaching into the land, and the inside or hidden side of a thing. In Arabic it is warāʾ: Lane gives warāʾī kadhā, "behind me is such a thing", min warāʾi warāʾ, "from behind a thing covering", and wārāhu, "he hid it, covered it". The w drops before u as it drops in the Juthoor tables, r is r, and the final glottal stop falls. Urashima is then the island of the beyond, the land behind the sea's boundary, and that is what he does in the poem: he rows past the boundary of the sea to Tokoyo.

Linguistic Root

The Old Japanese lexicon built on the eighth-century texts records three words written ura: inlet; inside, underside and heart; and the tip of a plant. It counts them as separate words. From the second come many words for what goes on in the heart without showing: longing at heart, crying to oneself, waiting anxiously.

The Arabic reading takes both Japanese senses into warāʾ: the inlet that runs in behind the land and is sheltered by it, and the hidden side of a thing. Lane keeps behind and covering in the same root: warāʾ, behind, and wārāhu, he hid it. The w that begins the Arabic word does not appear in Japanese, since Old Japanese has no syllable wu, so that w and u make one sound, and w is among the letters that drop in the Juthoor tables. The r stays and the final glottal stop drops.

The reading covers ura alone. Sima is the Japanese word for island, which eighth-century poets wrote as a separate graph, as in the name Kashima. 子 ko is child, and Tarō a name given in the fifteenth-century tales.

The limit of the reading is that the Japanese lexicon separates inlet from inside, and that the Tango Fudoki gives his name as Shimako and the inlet to the place, the inlet of Mizunoe.

Key Mythic Narratives

The tale in later centuries

In the fifteenth-century tale Urashima Tarō the story begins with a kindness: Urashima catches a turtle and lets it go; the next day a woman comes to him in a boat, he takes her to the dragon palace Ryūgū and marries her, and when he wants to go home after three years she tells him she is the turtle he freed and gives him a box he must not open. On land he finds that seven hundred years have passed; he opens the box, smoke comes out, he becomes an old man, then a crane, and he is worshipped in Tango as Urashima Myōjin. In the children's books of the eighteenth century the turtle carries him on its back there and back. The Ura shrine in the town of Ine in Tango still keeps old records of the story's origin.

Sister tales

The Heibonsha encyclopedia says that on the island of Okinoerabu the Urashima tale was joined to the story of sea luck and mountain luck, the story of Hoori and his brother, and that tales from China, Korea, Taiwan and Tibet resemble it, the closest being the story of the dragon's daughter at Lake Dongting in China. The Nipponica encyclopedia notes that time running faster in the other world than among people also appears in the tale of Kaguya-hime. It is a tale type known across the world, and the later English-language story of the man who slept twenty years in the mountains belongs to it.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In the Amazigh tale, Hammu Unamir is loved by a woman from the sky who marries him; he loses her through his mother's fault, climbs to her in the seventh heaven, and then loses himself through longing for his mother. Urashima marries the sea's daughter and lives in Tokoyo, then asks to go home to speak to his father and mother, and loses wife and life together. In both stories the man stands between a woman of the other world and his parents' house and cannot keep both.

Gilgamesh carried the plant of youth up from the bottom of the sea, meaning to take it home to Uruk, and the snake took it while he bathed on the way. Urashima carries from the sea palace a box that holds his life and opens it when he returns. In both stories what the other world gives is lost on the way home or at its door, and the man returns to his years.