Episode Details

Two tales from old Japan. First, the Ogre of Rashomon: all Kyoto fears to pass the great gate after sunset, and Watanabe, one of Raiko's five knights, rides out on a wager to prove the ogre a rumor — and comes home with the ogre's own huge arm as his trophy, sealed in an iron-banded box that he will show to no one, until one night his old nurse comes knocking. In keeping with this series' practice, the reading does not narrate the stroke at the gate itself; the arm, and all that follows from it, stand complete in Ozaki's own words, and no completeness is claimed for that stroke. Then, How an Old Man Lost His Wen: a good old man shelters from a storm in a hollow tree, finds himself the hidden guest at a feast of demons, and dances for them so well that their chief takes the hated lump from his cheek as his pledge — while his wicked neighbor, who cannot dance at all, goes to win the same favor by imitation.

Chapters:

00:05 The Ogre of Rashomon

12:39 How an Old Man Lost His Wen

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

KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.