The Stonecutter
A Japanese tale about a man who wished his way to the top of the world
Page 1
In a country of green mountains and narrow rivers there lived a stonecutter called Hanzo, and every morning he climbed the same path to the same mountain.
He cut stone out of it. Grey stone for walls, pale stone for steps, and now and then a smooth block for a temple lantern, which was the work he liked best.
There were twenty other cutters on that mountain and they all knew him. He was good at it, and he was strong, and he was not rich, and on most days that seemed perfectly fair to him.
There lived in the mountain a spirit, although Hanzo had never seen it.
Page 2
One day he carried a cut stone down to a rich man's house, and a servant waved him in through a side door.
Hanzo had never been inside such a place. There were painted screens of cranes and pine trees, and lacquer boxes, and a scroll hanging in an alcove with a single flower under it, and people bringing in trays of food he did not know the names of.
The rich man did not look at him. He was busy being fanned.
Hanzo put the stone down where he was told and went out again, and all the way home the thought sat on him like a weight.
"I wish," he said, "that I were a rich man."
And a voice from the mountain said: "You are a rich man."
Page 3
He said it in the doorway of his own hut, where he had slept every night of his life.
There was a straw mat, a cooking pot, a shelf with three bowls, and a chisel he had made himself when he was seventeen.
He turned round to look at the mat.
It was gone. So was the pot and the shelf and the hut, and Hanzo was standing in a room with painted screens, in a silk robe, with a servant waiting in the doorway to ask whether he wanted his tea now or later.
Page 4
For a while it was wonderful.
He had a garden with a pond and carp in it, and musicians, and more guests than he could remember the names of, and a cook who made him things he had never eaten.
Then one hot afternoon a prince came along the road beyond his wall, carried in a lacquered chair on the shoulders of eight men, with servants holding a golden parasol over him so that the sun could not touch him at all.
Everybody in the garden knelt. Hanzo knelt too. The gravel was very hot.
"I wish," he said into the gravel, "that I were a prince."
"You are a prince," said the mountain.
Page 5
So he was carried. Eight men took the weight of him, and the golden parasol went over his head, and all along the road people knelt in the dust as he passed, exactly as he had knelt.
It was everything he had wanted for about an hour.
Then he noticed that the grass at the roadside was burnt brown, and the rice in the paddies was curling, and the farmers were carrying water up from the river in buckets because it had not rained. And the sun came down through the golden parasol as if the parasol were not there, and his face ran with sweat, and nothing he owned could make it stop.
"The sun is greater than a prince," said Hanzo. "I wish I were the sun."
"You are the sun," said the mountain.
Page 6
And he was the sun.
He burned on the mountains and on the sea and on the rice fields, and the rivers went thin and silver beneath him, and the people below put straw hats on and worked anyway, because people do.
He burned on the rich man's garden and on the prince's road and on the quarry where twenty men were cutting stone, and he thought: there is nothing above me at all.
Then a cloud came between him and the earth, and he could not see through it, and he could not burn through it, and it drifted along underneath him taking its time.
"I wish," said Hanzo, "that I were a cloud."
Page 7
He was a cloud, and it was a great deal of fun at first.
He put himself between the sun and the earth whenever he liked. He grew dark and he rained, and he rained hard, and the river came up over its banks and the paddies filled and the roads turned to mud and the people ran for their doorways with their baskets over their heads.
He washed soil off the hills. He knocked a bridge out. He flooded a road.
And when at last he stopped, and the mist lifted, there was one thing in the whole valley that he had not moved at all.
The mountain stood exactly where it had always stood, with the rain running off it.
"I wish I were the rock," said Hanzo.
Page 8
So he was the rock.
He was the mountain itself, grey and huge and cold, and the rain ran off him and the wind went round him and the sun beat on him and none of it mattered in the slightest. Pines grew out of his sides. Clouds parted on him. People at the bottom looked like seeds.
He stood there, enormously, for a long time, and he thought: at last. Nothing in the world is greater than this.
And then he felt something small and sharp at his foot. Tap. Tap. Tap.
He looked down, as far as a mountain can look down, and there was a man with a mallet and a chisel, cutting a piece off him.
Page 9
A man. A small, ordinary, sunburnt man with a mallet, taking pieces off a mountain and stacking them on a sledge, and whistling.
And Hanzo, who had been a rich man and a prince and the sun and a cloud and was now several million tons of granite, understood something, and if a mountain could laugh he would have laughed.
"I wish," he said, "that I were a stonecutter."
And the mountain, who had been very patient all day, said: "You are a stonecutter."
Page 10
He finished the lantern he had been shaping, and he carried it down to the temple himself, and the priest put it beside the path where it still stands.
Then he walked home along the edge of the paddies with the frogs starting up and the mountain going blue behind him.
He was not rich. He was not a prince. He was not the sun or a cloud or the rock.
He was a stonecutter, which is a good thing to be if you are good at it, and Hanzo was very good at it indeed.
And he never wished for anything again — or at least, not out loud, and not where the mountain could hear him.
About this story
- Audience: kids (ages 6–12)
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