Japan is a beautiful country I’d love to visit someday, and that’s a pretty popular
sentiment out here in the west.
Obviously the global tourist appeal of an entire nation is a very complex and multifaceted
affair that can’t be boiled down to a single simple factor driving traffic, but like…
it’s definitely anime, right?
C’mon.
At least mostly.
And I feel like that’s reasonable - if you’re passionate about a story it makes sense to
develop a curiosity about where that story comes from.
One of the most efficient methods of cultural exchange is storytelling - it provides a window
into a foreign cultural experience and that potentially sparks increased interest in the
culture from people who might otherwise never deal with it.
Of course, hearing stories from a culture is not the same thing as understanding that
culture, but if the stories trigger an initial interest it can still lead to a broader, more
immersive learning experience.
And the process also happens in reverse - learning about a place and culture can make you curious
about its stories and folktales.
One of the favorite passtimes of historical globetrotters has been going somewhere new
and then documenting as many local stories as they can get their hands on - history,
folktales, mythologized combinations of the two.
The fact is, people like stories, and good stories make people want to know more.
Back at the turn of the 1900s, British dude Richard Gordon Smith demonstrated my point
handily by spending most of his later life traveling as far east as he could manage,
which, considering the alternative was living in England, makes a lot of sense.
He ended up settling in Japan for a good chunk of his later years, but on the way he kept
extensive journals of his travels and later collected some of the stories he’d heard
into an anthology of folktales called Ancient Tales and Folklore of Japan, which is where
we find the story we’ll be talking about today.
Unfortunately this is the only place we can find this specific story - while it seems
pretty unlikely that Smith fully made it up, it isn’t specifically corroborated anywhere
else I can find.
So, with the understanding that a british tourist isn’t gonna have the most accurate
and culturally nuanced understanding of this tale, let’s get into it.
So our story begins with Hojo Takatoki, last regent of the Kamakura shogunate, exiling
a samurai named Oribe Shima to the faraway Oki islands for an unspecified crime.
This banishment unsurprisingly separates Oribe Shima from his daughter Tokoyo, who is none
too pleased at this new arrangement and resolves to get him back no matter what.
She sells her belongings, heads to port, tries and fails to charter a boat and then just
takes one instead.
She manages to get to the Oki islands but has no luck finding her father - nobody knows
where he is, and even if they did, he’s been exiled and that means helping him out
is a no-no in general.
Tokoyo runs herself pretty ragged trying to find any sign of her dad’s whereabouts and
eventually she’s pretty solidly worn out.
One night she fires off a quick prayer at a shrine and lies down to sleep, but wakes
up soon after to find a praying priest and a crying little girl at the water’s edge,
which is… never a good combination.
The priest goes to push the girl in but Tokoyo rushes in to save her, and the priest very
quickly explains himself - see, there’s a sea-monster down there who demands that
they sacrifice a girl once a year or he’ll batter the island with terrible storms.
Tokoyo is about fed up with her current situation and decides she’s got nothing left to lose,
so she may as well kill the sea monster, right?
You know, when you’ve got nothing better to do.
She gives the priest a letter to give to her father, sticks a knife between her teeth and
dives in.
She swims to the bottom of the sea without too much difficulty, apparently thanks to
her early years pearl-diving with the locals in her hometown, and finds a luminous cave
with a dude in it!
But here’s a twist, the dude is not, as she initially believes, the sea monster - on
closer inspection it’s actually a wooden statue of Hojo Takatoki himself, the man who
exiled her father.
She initially considers taking out some well-deserved pent-up aggression on it but decides to rescue
it instead, and lugs it out of the cave.
But that’s when the sea monster shows up!
Weighed down by a statue and, lest we forget, at the bottom of the ocean, Tokoyo looks like
pretty easy prey - and that is the sea monster’s first and last mistake, as Tokoyo nails it
right in the eye and follows up by stabbing it in the heart.
Unsurprisingly, it dies.
Tokoyo drags the statue and the corpse of the sea monster to the surface and is hailed
as a hero by the locals, presumably after first ruling out the possibilities that she’s
some kind of physical god or gumption-powered anime protagonist.
Word of her bravery and sick gains makes its way all the way back to Hojo Takatoki himself,
who happens to have recovered from a lasting illness at the exact moment Tokoyo pulled
his statue out of the water, so the obvious conclusion is that the statue was in some
way cursing him and Tokoyo accidentally saved him from a slow and painful death.
In gratitude he immediately orders her father to be released from prison and exile and Tokoyo
is finally reunited with her dad.
They return home, safe and secure in the knowledge that Tokoyo is a stone-cold monster-slayin’
badass with lungs of titanium.
It’s not directly stated in-story, but we can infer that Beowulf is off in the corner
furiously taking notes.