Once having secured the branch, I felt impatient to be on my way. I boarded ship and, borne along by a favoring wind, returned in somewhat over four hundred days.
I boarded a ship at Naniwa and set out to sea. At about nine o'clock in the morning of the five-hundredth day of our journey we faintly perceived a mountain rising from the waves.
As I walked around its steep sides, I saw flowering trees of a kind unknown to me.
Excerpts from
Tale of the Bamboo Cutter
Translated by Donald Keene, 1956
