Chapter Thirty-Two The Legend of Urashima Tarō, Part III
Urashima Tarō returned home with his gift from the princess Otohime, but found that the world had irrevocably changed in his
absence.
The buildings were taller than they had been only days ago, now made of a strange material that glinted like the sun across
the sea. The roads had turned black and firm, and strange machines rushed across them at dizzying speeds. The people wore
foreign clothes, the undyed robes of the poor fishing village a distant memory.
Something was very wrong.
Urashima Tarō walked slowly up the beach, the box from Otohime clutched tightly in one hand, and asked a man resting on the
shore what had happened to his village.
“Nothing has happened,” the man said, seeming not to understand the question.
Urashima Tarō walked home in his strange new world, but found that the home he had built with his mother no longer stood.
A new one had been built in its place.
How long have I been gone? he thought, dread settling in his stomach.
“What year is it?” he asked an old man who stood outside smoking.
The man told him, and Urashima Tarō realized that he had been gone not for three days, but for three hundred years.
His mother had died alone, never knowing where her son had gone.
He fell to his knees in grief and cursed the princess Otohime for her gift that had ruined him. He gripped the box she had
given him in his trembling hands.
Then, forgetting her warning, he opened it.
A cloud of smoke burst forth, and with it, out came the time he had borrowed while at the emperor’s palace beneath the sea.
The stolen years rushed over him, centuries of human life devouring him in a single breath. His hair turned gray and his skin
turned sallow, his bones flimsy and muscles weak as he rapidly aged. His flesh dissolved and he collapsed into a pile of ashes,
which the wind carried away.