Urashima, Master Urashima no Ko—A fisherman who wandered in his boat to the island of the Immortals and married a beautiful maiden there. Three years later he returned, homesick, to his village, carrying a box that his wife had given him with the warning never to open it. Three hundred years had passed, and everything had changed. In despair he opened the box. His wife's wraith floated out of it and into the sky, and in that instant he aged three hundred years. The earliest occurrence of the story is among the surviving fragments of an early-eighth-century work (Tango fudoki).
