Momotarō, the Peach Boy

Far away, in a village between a mountain and a river, there lived an old man and an old woman who had wanted a child for a very long time and had stopped saying so out loud. One morning the old woman was washing clothes at the river when something came down the current towards her. It was a peach, and an enormous one, bigger than her head. She waded in and got it, and carried it home, and she and the old man put it on the table and fetched the big knife. The peach split open by itself. Inside, sitting up, was a baby boy, who looked at the two of them and laughed. They called him Momotarō, which means peach boy, and they raised him, and he grew up strong and cheerful and a good deal better at climbing than was good for anybody. When he was fifteen he came in one evening and said that he had been hearing about the ogres. There was an island out in the sea where they lived, and they came ashore now and then and took whatever they liked, and the villages along that coast had put up with it for years because nobody could think what else to do. "I am going to go and talk to them," said Momotarō. His mother made him a bag of millet dumplings, which she said were the best in the country, and she was not exaggerating. He set off along the road. A spotted dog came out of a gateway and asked where he was going, and what was in the bag. "The island," said Momotarō. "Millet dumplings. Would you like one?" The dog had one, and came too. A monkey came down out of a pine tree and asked the same question, and got the same answer, and had a dumpling, and came too. And a pheasant landed in the road ahead of them, and asked, and ate, and came too. They found a boat and rowed out to the island, the four of them, and went up to the great gate and knocked on it. What happened inside took most of the afternoon. The pheasant went over the wall and had a look round. The monkey got the bar off the gate. The dog stood in the doorway and made a noise that persuaded a great many ogres to sit down and listen. And Momotarō walked in and told the ogre chief, quite politely, that this had gone on long enough, and asked him what exactly he thought he was doing. The ogre chief, who had never once been asked, did not have a good answer ready. They came home with a cart of everything that had been taken, and gave it back down the coast village by village. And the four of them were friends for the rest of their lives. The end.