THE STORY INDEX
A growing collection of myths and legends, with their origins, variations, and sources.
She carried soil in her skirt to build Hallasan, and drowned in a bottomless pool on its slopes. Her traces are all over Jeju, yet the shamans have no song of her own, and scholars still argue over whether she was ever a goddess.
Read story 10 min readA white horse knelt by a well, then rose into the sky and left an egg. The boy inside became the first king of Silla, and two more royal houses began with a chest from the sea and a golden chest in a tree.
Read story 13 min readThey wrestle travellers all night and turn out to be an old broom by morning; they knock gold out of a club and run from the crack of a hazelnut. Their name is in Korean books from 1447, but the horns they wear today, a Korean folklorist argues, were drawn for them in colonial-era school readers.
Read story 10 min readA voice on a hilltop told nine chiefs to sing to a turtle, and six golden eggs came down from the sky. The first boy out founded Gaya, and his queen sailed in under a red sail from a land called Ayuta.
Read story 13 min readOn a mountain in the far northwest, the old books say, the Lord on High kept his capital on earth, guarded by a nine-headed beast, and the Queen Mother of the West grew peaches that ripen once in three thousand years. A Han emperor gave its name to real mountains, and the historian who recorded it did not believe him.
Read story 13 min readA king had his seventh daughter shut in a box and thrown into a river because she was not a son, and she came back from the other world with the water that raised him from his bier. Korean shamans still sing her story at the rites for the dead, and count her as their ancestor.
Read story 9 min readKorea's oldest books know the fox as an omen, a demon in a monk's robe and, once, a mountain god who helped a famous monk. The gumiho who longs to become human, and counts the years or the livers until she does, comes mostly from television.
Read story 13 min readIn India and in early China the bodhisattva who hears the cries of the world was a man, painted at Dunhuang with a moustache more than a thousand years ago. A princess who gave her eyes and arms to save her father, in a legend carved in stone in 1100, gave Guanyin a woman's life.
Read story 11 min readA white snake takes a woman's form, marries a young man of Hangzhou and is shut under Leifeng Pagoda by the monk Fahai. In the oldest full telling, from 1624, she is a demon and the tale a warning; the loving wife and mother were made on the Qing stage.
Read story 11 min readA boy kills the Dragon King's son, gives his flesh and bones back to his parents to spare them, and returns in a body made of lotus. Two Ming novels made him famous, but the boy god had reached China centuries earlier, with Buddhism, from India.
Read story 11 min readThe oldest Chinese dictionary says the long can be dark or bright, tiny or huge, and climbs to heaven at the spring equinox. It brought the rain, became the emperor's sign and gave East Asia its dragon kings, and English calls it, not quite rightly, a dragon.
Read story 13 min readHe beat the storm-calling Chiyou with the help of a drought goddess, and rode a dragon into the sky from the foot of Mount Jing. Sima Qian made him the first sovereign of Chinese history, but no inscription names him before the 4th century BCE.
Read story 10 min readHis father stole a soil that grew by itself to block the flood and was put to death for it; Yu dug the waters a way to the sea and became the founder of China's first dynasty. In the oldest witnesses he is not yet a king, but a worker sent by Heaven.
Read story 10 min readTwo stars face each other across the Milky Way, and once a year, on the seventh night of the seventh month, the Weaver crosses to the Cowherd. In the oldest full telling it was the Lord of Heaven who married them, and he parted them only because she stopped weaving.
Read story 10 min readIn Chinese popular religion the Jade Emperor rules heaven as an emperor rules his officials, and his birthday falls on the ninth day of the first month. Yet he is younger than Heaven itself: Song emperors gave him his titles in the 11th and 12th centuries, and in Daoist doctrine three gods still stand above him.
Read story 11 min readA monkey born from a stone learned the arts of the immortals, ate the peaches of heaven and fought its armies until the Buddha caught him in one hand. The novel that tells it was printed in 1592 without its author's name, and the monkey himself is centuries older.
Read story 14 min readA bamboo cutter finds a tiny girl in a glowing stalk, five noblemen fail at impossible quests, and the people of the moon take her home, leaving the emperor an elixir he has burned on Mount Fuji. It is Japan's oldest tale in prose, and it was not a folk tale: a learned man wrote it, and his name is lost.
Read story 11 min readA courtier rode out with a red banner to fetch the thunder for his emperor, and caught it twice. Japan's oldest books are full of thunder and wind gods, but the pair with the ring of drums and the bag of wind came later, with Buddhist art from China.
Read story 10 min readA fisherman catches a turtle that becomes a woman, lives three years in her land beyond the sea, and comes home to find three hundred years gone. Japan has told the story since the 8th century, but the children on the beach, the ride on the turtle's back and even the name Tarō came much later.
Read story 10 min readAn old woman pulls a giant peach from the river, and the boy named after it sails to the island of the oni with a dog, a monkey and a pheasant. In the oldest picture books, though, he does not come out of the peach: the old couple eat it, grow young again and have a son.
Read story 10 min readHorned, wrapped in tiger skin and armed with an iron club, the oni is the ogre Japan drives out with beans every year. Yet the oldest oni has one eye and no description, the word may once have meant something hidden, and in some villages the oni at the door is a god.
Read story 12 min readA woman in white breathes death on an old woodcutter and spares the young one, on one condition. Japan's most famous snow-woman story was first printed in English, by Lafcadio Hearn in 1904; the snow woman herself is much older, and much stranger.
Read story 10 min readA creature the size of a child, with a hollow of water on its head, waits in the river for horses and swimmers, yet a polite bow can drain its strength. Japan's best-known water spirit has dozens of local names, and an encyclopedia of 1712 draws it as a hairy, upright figure like an ape, not a turtle.
Read story 13 min readA man of Mino married a woman who turned out to be a fox, and asked her to keep coming to sleep with him: that, says a book of about 822, is why the fox is called kitsune. Over the next thousand years the Japanese fox became a trickster, a wife, a messenger of the god Inari and, for some families, a stigma that lasted into modern times.
Read story 11 min read
