Читать книгу Japanese Children's Favorite Stories Book Two - Florence Sakade - Страница 10

The Rolling Rice Cakes

Once upon a time there was an old man and his old wife. One day the old man said: "I'm going to cut some firewood today. Please make me some rice cakes for my lunch." So the old woman made rice cakes and put them in the old man's lunch box. Then the old man left the house.

He went far into the forest and cut firewood all morning. When it was noon, he sat down to eat and opened his lunch box, saying: "Now, for some of the old lady's delicious rice cakes."

Then he suddenly cried: "Oh, my!" because one of the rice cakes had fallen out of the box, and he saw it go rolling away. Away it rolled, and suddenly down it plopped into a hole in the ground.

The old man ran over to the hole and—what do you know!—he could hear tiny voices singing inside the hole. "What's going on down there?" he asked himself. "I'll drop one more rice cake down and see."

After he had dropped the second rice cake into the hole, he put his ear close to the ground, and now he could hear the words of the song. And this is the song the tiny voices were singing:

Rice cakes, rice cakes,

Nice, fat rice cakes,

Rolling, rolling, rolling—down!

"What a beautiful song," the old man said, and he kept rolling rice cakes down the hole until they were all gone. Then he leaned far over to peek into the hole.

Suddenly he called out: "Help! Help!" But it was too late—he had fallen in, and with a thump-thump-thump he too went rolling right down the hole.

There at the bottom of the hole he found hundreds of field mice. They had eaten all his rice cakes and now they were singing again as they pounded rice.

"Thank you very much for the delicious rice cakes, old man," the leader of the mice said. "To show our thanks we'll give you this bag of rice." And the mouse gave the old man a small bag of rice about the size of a fat coin purse.

"Goodbye, old rolling man," all the mice called. And then they sang another song:

Nice man, rice man,

Nice, fat mice man,

Rolling, rolling, rolling—up!

And as they sang the old man felt himself rolling right up and out of the hole.

Once he was on top of the ground, the old man brushed himself off and then went home, carrying the small bag of rice with him.

When his old wife heard his story and saw the rice, she said: "Humpf! That won't make more than two or three rice cakes." But when she started pouring the rice out, they were surprised to discover that the bag always stayed full, no matter how much they poured out of it. It was a magic rice bag, a wonderful present that the mice had given them. After that they always had all the rice they could possibly eat. The old woman made rice cakes for herself and the old man every day—mountains of them—and they lived happily ever afterward.