This is Andrea Elise for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club.
Hello, my name is Andrea Elise and I live in Amarillo, Texas.
When you think of the different fairy tales you’ve read to your children or students, and those other people have read to you, what are the first four words that often come to mind?
For me, those words are “Once upon a time.” That short introduction signals that something interesting, maybe frightening and/or maybe completely joyful is about to happen.
Today I would like to discuss a story in a small volume I stumbled upon at my father’s house recently. It is a book called “Japanese Fairy Tales,” compiled by Lafcadio Hearn and published by Peter Pauper Press, copywritten in 1948 and 1958.
This beautiful hard-back book (which, by the way, has the original price tag of $1.00 on the inside of the dust cover) contains eight short fairy tales.
Before discussing one of the stories, I would like to make some remarks about Japanese folktales in general. These are comments I learned through just a bit of research.
Folktales are an important cultural aspect of Japan. In a more stringent sense, they refer to orally transmitted folk narrative pioneered these collections, but he disliked that term that is most similar to the word “folktale.” Yanagita preferred a Japanese word that, when translated, meant “tales of long ago.”
Professional storytellers were hired to entertain the daimyo lord at his bedside, and the word “folktale” remained in place through the late 19th century. In the middle of the 20th century, storytellers would often travel from town to town telling these stories with special paper illustrations.
The book to which I refer includes beautiful illustrations for all of the eight tales, including the one I chose to discuss today, “The Fountain of Youth.”
This tale begins with the words, “Long, long ago,” and it tells the story of a very old couple who have no children and live in a forest. The old man is a woodcutter by trade and his wife likes to weave while her husband is collecting wood.
One day the man could not find the kind of wood he desired, so he went deeper into the forest than usual. Much to his surprise, he found a clear spring with sparkling water. He leaned forward and was able to rinse his face and drink the water.
As he stood up, he saw his reflection in the stream. Gone was the old, bald man. In his place stood a handsome YOUNG man with clear skin and beautiful hair.
The husband rushed home to tell his wife. At first, the wife was terrified because she did not recognize the strong and handsome man who burst into their home. Once the old (now young) man convinced her that he was her husband, she began to worry that he would not want to live with such an old lady.
Getting directions from her husband, the wife ran to the stream and took several gulps of the water. Her husband waited for her to return, but she never came home. He was frightened and ran back to the tall grass area by the stream.
What he saw was not his wife. Her clothes were all there, but what he found was an infant, probably only 6 months old. It seemed that the wife drank too much of the stream water and it took her back to the period of speechless infancy.
The old-now-young man took the child in his arms and carried her home, thinking “strange and melancholy thoughts.”
Is there a lesson we should learn from this, or is it simply an unusual story that we can read to our children and grandchildren as they dream of the future? That is up to each of us to decide.
