Sentaro has everything a man could wish for — an inherited fortune, an easy life, and no need to work — and only one sorrow: the knowledge that one day he must die. Determined to live five or six hundred years at least, he sets out to find the hermits who keep the Elixir of Life, and after seven days of prayer at the shrine of Jofuku he is granted his wish in an unexpected way: a little paper crane that grows beneath him and carries him across the sea to the Country of Perpetual Life, where no one has ever died. But Sentaro finds a land turned upside down — a people weary of their endless years, longing for the very death he fled — and three hundred years must pass before he learns the lesson Jofuku meant to teach him.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
From Japanese Fairy Tales by Yei Theodora Ozaki (1908), public domain; told in a fresh in-house rendering.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
