The crane returns a favor, retold by Taiko

むかし むかし, mukashi, mukashi (long ago) a young farmer was working on the land when he saw a beautiful white crane fall out of the sky onto the ground in front of him. The crane had an arrow in one of her wings. He rushed to pull the arrow out and clean the wound and soon the bird was flying again. As the crane flew away he shouted after her to be careful and stay away from hunters.

When the young man went home that night he was shocked to see a stranger in his doorway. It was a beautiful woman who said she was his new wife. The young man was worried, he told her that he was too poor to take care of her and didn’t have much money or food. But she told him not to worry because she had plenty of rice in her bag. Even though he was surprised and confused they started a happy life together and her bag of rice was always full.

The woman asked her new husband to build her room to weave in and he did. She told him that he could never ever look inside the room and went into the room to work for seven days. When she came out she had a woven beautiful cloth which she gave to her husband to sell at the market. He did this and got a really good price for the cloth.

After some time the woman went back into the weaving room, telling him again not to enter while she is working. But the husband was very curious and he peeked inside. He saw the crane that he saved, she was plucking her own feathers to weave the beautiful cloth. When she saw him she told him she wanted to repay his kindness for saving her but now that he had seen her as a crane she could not stay with him anymore so she gave him the last cloth she made and flew away into the sky forever.