This book was written by Marguerite Siek. This book has five short stories from Japan. I knew three stories of them. They are very famous stories in Japan. When I was a child, my teacher and my mother read these stories for me. I’ll introduce one of them.
The title is “The Farmer and the Crane.” I think this is one of the most famous stories in Japan. One autumn evening long ago, a young farmer saved a crane from a trap. Time passes and the winter came. One evening, the farmer was sitting alone in his little house. Outside, snow was falling. Suddenly there was a knock on the door. A beautiful young lady was looking for lodging because she had become lost in the snowy dark. She was kind and hardworking, and the young farmer loved her. They got married, but they were poor. She hid in her room and made beautiful cloth, and the young farmer sold it at the market.
“You mustn’t look at me while I work,” she said.
She worked so hard, so he worried about her, and one day he took a peek. He didn’t see his wife. There was the crane he had rescued, using her feathers to make the cloth.
“Now you know what I am,” she said sadly. “Now I must leave you. I love you very much, but now I must go.”
The crane left the house. She never came back.
I knew this story, but I didn’t know how to explain it in English. It is difficult to translate Japanese into English, so this book was very good for me to learn English.
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