Long ago, in the province of Tango, there lived a man named Urashima. He had a son called Urashima Taro, a man of twenty-four or twenty-five. Morning and evening Taro fished in the sea and so supported his parents.
One day, as Taro was fishing at a place called the shore of Ejima, he caught a turtle. "It would be a pity for you to lose your life here," said Taro. "Don't they say the crane lives a thousand years and the turtle ten thousand? Living things do not forget a kindness." And he let the turtle go back into the sea.
The next day, when Taro went out to sea, a small boat was drifting far off on the water, with a single beautiful woman in it. Weeping, she begged him, "On my way somewhere I met a storm; many people were thrown into the sea, and only this boat drifted here. Please take me back to my own country."
Pitying her, Taro rowed the boat, and in a little over ten days they reached her home. It was a palace too splendid for words, walled in silver and roofed with rows of golden tiles. "Let us become husband and wife here," said the woman, and they made their vows.
On each of its four sides the palace showed a different season. Open the east doors, and there was spring, with plum and cherry in full bloom. Look south, and there was summer, with deutzia flowering and cicadas singing. To the west was autumn, the maples turning red. To the north was winter, covered in snow.
Three years passed in happy days. Taro began to worry about his parents back home and said, "Give me leave for thirty days or so. I want to see how my parents are." Weeping, the woman said, "I have hidden it until now, but I am the turtle whose life you saved. I became your wife to repay that kindness. Take this to remember me by. But you must never open it," and she gave him a beautiful box.
When Taro returned home, there was no trace that anyone had lived there; it had become open field. When he asked an old man, the man said, "I have heard that the man called Urashima lived seven hundred years ago." Taro sought out his parents' graves and wept in grief.
At last Taro opened the box he had been told never to open. Three wisps of purple cloud rose from it, and Taro at once became an old man. Then Taro turned into a crane and flew up into the sky.
Afterward, Urashima Taro appeared in Tango as the god Urashima Myojin, and he and the turtle were worshiped together as a married pair of gods. A happy ending indeed.