Episode Details

An old man and an old woman, childless all their lives, find a great peach floating down the river — and inside it a beautiful boy, Heaven's answer to their long lament. They name him Momotaro, Son of a Peach. At fifteen he is taller and far stronger than any boy in the country, and he asks his foster-parents' leave to sail to the island in the north-eastern sea, the stronghold of a band of devils who have robbed and terrified the land for years. On the road he wins three companions with shares of his mother's rice-cakes — a dog, a monkey and a pheasant — and leads them across the sea to the devils' castle. There the chief of the devils, his strength spent, kneels before Momotaro, breaks off his own horns in token of submission, and gives up all the treasure hidden in the castle; the captives are set free, and Momotaro returns home in triumph to the old couple's joy. In keeping with this series' practice, the reading leaves out the battle on the island itself and passes from the little company's entry into the castle to the chief's surrender; no completeness is claimed for that scene.

From Japanese Fairy Tales by Yei Theodora Ozaki (1908), public domain; told in a fresh in-house rendering.

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