When the Festival of Bon arrived, the time of returning souls, the good folk of Yedo took lanterns and visited the graves of their loved ones. They would bring us food and flowers to care for us. On the night of the thirteenth day of the seventh month, my beloved...
I knew from the moment I heard him speak that he was not an ordinary pig. But he was still a pig! And he had come to the castle to marry me. I had no escape. The street was full of pigs. All the pigs in the world had come to the castle that day. What could I do? It...
I looked all around the world in search of fear, because I didn’t know what fear was. I wasn’t afraid of the living or the dead. One day, I came into a large town square crowded with people. A pigeon had been set loose over the crowd and he landed on my...
My mother called me to come to her room and look in the mirror that would show us the whereabouts of King Lino. There he was, chained in the prison tower of a powerful magician. Still, he was alive—and in every way as noble a man as I had imagined him to be. Then we...
