ABSTRACT
When I first read this tale in a book entitled Once Upon a Time in Japan (one of the few available books in English at the Narita Airport in Tokyo!), I was fascinated by it, for it reminded me of the near-death journey in the afterlife. In its simplicity, the story tells us of the possibility that we may leave our everyday reality and enter a different dimension which is much more pleasurable than our present one, but which in a sense does not belong to us. This shift from one reality to another is known in Japan as the ‘urashima effect’.
