he arrives at his destination. Here in a valley he sees a company of Asura (demons of Indian myth) engaged in cutting up an immense kiri-tree (Paullownia Imperialis) which they had felled. These demons "had hair like upright sword-blades, their faces burned like flames of fire, their feet and hands resembled spades and mattocks, their eyes gleamed like chargers of burnished metal." Toshikage is in danger of faring ill at their hands, when a boy comes down from the sky, riding on a dragon, amid a storm of thunder and lightning and rain, bearing a golden tablet, with instructions to the Asura to let him go, and to give him part of the tree they had felled, so that he might make it into lutes. He makes thirty lutes and goes his way, the lutes being carried for him by a whirlwind, which arises opportunely.
After other adventures of an equally wonderful kind, Toshikage returns to Japan and makes his report to the Mikado. He retires into private life, marries, and has one daughter. He and his wife die, leaving the daughter in great poverty. She lives in a secluded spot in the suburbs of Kiōto, where she is one day visited by a youth who was accompanying his father to worship at the shrine of Kamo. On his return home the next morning, his father, enraged at him for giving his parents so great anxiety by his disappearance, forbids him in future to leave his sight for a moment. When, after some years, he is able to visit the place where his lady-love dwelt, the house had completely disappeared.
Meanwhile Toshikage's daughter gives birth to a child, who, like many of the heroes of Chinese and Japanese romance, is a prodigy of precocious talent and filial devotion. At the age of five he sustains his mother by the fish which he catches, and at a later time brings her
