Urashima Tarō Opens the Forbidden Box

He saves the turtle from the children who are tormenting it.

This is the act that sets everything in motion: Urashima Tarō, a young fisherman from a coastal village, finds children on the beach maltreating a sea turtle, and he pays them to stop or he intervenes or he simply takes the turtle away — the details vary, but the kindness is consistent. He releases the turtle into the sea.

The next day, or the next week, a turtle comes to his boat. It speaks. It says: I am the turtle you saved. The Dragon King’s daughter wishes to thank you. Will you come to the Dragon Palace beneath the sea?

He gets on the turtle’s back.

The sea closes over them.

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Ryūgū-jō is everything the sea hides — the palace at the bottom of the ocean, the place where the Dragon King and his daughter Otohime live among fish-courtiers and coral and the accumulated treasure of every ship that has ever sunk. The palace is permanent spring in one wing, summer in the next, autumn in the next, winter in the last — so that time in the palace is a cycle rather than a direction, the seasons present simultaneously rather than sequentially.

Otohime receives him. She is beautiful in the way that the daughters of supernatural rulers are always beautiful — the kind of beauty that makes the visitor understand they have been somewhere that will make ordinary beauty insufficient afterward.

He stays. He feasts. He dances. He watches the fish-servants. He is entertained by whatever entertainments the Dragon Palace provides, which are many and various and all of them pleasant.

He stays three days. Or he stays three years. In the palace, the count is ambiguous.

Then he wants to go home.

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Otohime gives him a lacquer box called the tamatebako — the box of the jeweled hand — and says: Take this with you. But do not open it. Whatever happens, do not open it.

He promises.

He gets back on the turtle. He surfaces. He walks up the beach to the village.

Nothing is the same.

The houses are different. The people on the road are strangers. The old friends he asks for have been dead for a hundred years. The house his parents lived in is gone. Three hundred years have passed while he spent three days in the palace where the seasons exist simultaneously.

He is not yet old. He is as he was when he went under. But everyone who was his is gone, and the world has moved past him while the palace kept him young.

He stands on the beach with the lacquer box.

He opens it.

The smoke comes out. The smoke is everything the three hundred years contained — the age he was owed, the time that was not experienced but accumulated anyway. It rises from the box and falls on him and he becomes immediately, catastrophically, irreversibly old. The accounts describe white hair and withered skin and the collapse that comes from three centuries arriving at once.

He falls on the beach.

The turtle is gone. The sea is the ordinary sea.

The box was empty the moment he opened it, and it took everything he had the moment it emptied.