Week 7 Reading B: Japanese Mythology

The story of Urashima seemed very familiar to me, even though I had never read it before. I have read stories following the exact same pattern, only with fairies instead of a sea goddess. The fairy stories I had read previously were from the UK, but they followed the same pattern of a person going into another realm and falling in love with someone there, living for generations but not noticing the passage of time, asking to visit home, and then realizing how much time had passed and dying. I find it interesting that this story structure would appear in two cultures so far removed from one another.

                                     
                                                                          (Urashima)