Spendor of Okinawa Bonus: A story from the Ryukyu Kingdom (Sunday: 26no23)


The Dragon and the Centipede

 

One hot summer day a dragon came down from heaven to take a sound afternoon nap in the shade of a tree, since even heaven doesn’t have anything so relaxing as shady trees. 


Along came a centipede, panting in the blaze of the sun, with his tiny multiply paired legs scurrying to escape the awful heat. “Ah, what luck! This looks like a nice cool hole,” said the centipede, not realizing that the hole before him was the dragon’s ear. So, in the blink of an eye, he was out of the sun and in exactly the kind of cool hole he’d been looking for..


(A centipede: http://gaygamer.net/2007/05/centipedes_millipedes_and_cata_1.html)


The dragon suddenly raised his splendid beard in surprise and opened his eyes. “Hey, what the devil is that?” he cried and, feeling something crawling in his ear, began shaking his head around and whacking his ear with his giant foot..

       

Now it was the centipede in the dragon’s ear that was shocked. “Ah! It’s, it’s an earthquake,” he shouted as he tumbled around. The terrified centipede tried to hold on with his hundred feet and bit into the wall of the ear wherever he could to steady himself.

        

At that point, the dragon could stand the pain no longer. He let out a groan, “Wah, wah,” and struggling with the horrible hurt in his ear went flying back up to heaven. There, what had been a clear blue sky, suddenly turned black. Immediately, a raging storm with flashes of lightning and growling thunder crossed heaven from end to end.  But even those antics could not stop the painful itching in the dragon’s ear.

       

Finally exhausted, the dragon came back down to this world, where the pain had begun and so where its cause must be found. Changing into a human, he ran for relief to a famous doctor, pleading “Please do something about this demon, or whatever it is, in my ear.”

        

But after examining the ear, the doctor realized that this patient was not a human at all and warned him, “What exactly are you? If you want to be cured, change back into your real form.”

        

The dragon apologized, “I’m sorry. I’m really a dragon. I changed into a human so I wouldn’t scare you.” To the dragon’s surprise, the doctor wasn't in the least frightened when he resumed his fierce dragon form. The doctor just shrugged and claimed many of his patients looked far more terrible. 

        

So, since the dragon was so polite and had changed back to his original form as requested, the doctor agreed to examine him. The doctor looked deep into the dragon’s ear and discovered the centipede. “There’s a centipede in there. Well now, you probably can’t put up with that for long,” he said and decided in a flash just what would do the trick.

        

A few minutes later, the doctor came back with a chicken cradled in his arms. He carefully let the chicken loose into the dragon’s huge ear. Actually, the doctor expected the chicken to come out holding the centipede in its beak. But, to the contrary, with a careless shake of her head, the chicken suddenly emerged smiling, having already gobbled down the poor centipede.


“I’m cured! Doctor, you’re a genius,” exclaimed the dragon, with his ear now cured and no special sympathy for the centipede who’d become the chicken’s snack. The dragon was so delighted that he gave the doctor a piece of glittering golden dragon-dung as a thank-you present and flew happily back up to heaven. 


For the doctor, the dragon’s gift was a chance of a lifetime in his practice  of medicine. For dragon-dung will cure any and all illnesses, but is uniquely hard to come by. Besides, haggling over fees with a dragon, even a friendly one, could be hazardous. 


So, the doctor gratefully accepted the dragon’s present and didn’t even ask for any further fee for his services. Though he did make a mental note to have his nurse check the financial viability of future patients before allowing them into his clinic, a practice doctors continue to follow even to this day..

 

It is said that due to the effectiveness of his dragon-dung treatments, people flocked to the doctor to be cured of their ills, and he thus became even more rich and famous.   


Note on pronunciation: Okinawan consonants sound much the same as their alphabetical counterparts in English. Vowels follow the sounds of the a,e,i,o,u of Italian or Spanish. Doubling means that the vowel is lengthened, not repeated.


 Story: compiled and written in Japanese by Kyoko Ishikawa. English translation by William A. O’Donnell (odomnail@rocketmail.com), edited by Thomas Marsh. 

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