Yao Bikuni

◆ The legend

A legend from Wakasa, in today's Fukui Prefecture, about a nun who lived a very long life. One day, a girl ate a strange piece of meat her father had brought home. It was the flesh of a ningyo, a Japanese mermaid. From then on, it is said, she stayed a young woman forever and never grew a single day older.

Her husband, her family, her friends: one by one they all grew old and left this world before her. Left alone, she became a nun and wandered from province to province, planting camellias and other trees wherever she went, or so the story goes. When she was about eight hundred years old, she returned home to Wakasa, walked into a cave in Obama, and never came out again. Even now, trees said to have been planted by her, and tales of places she stopped along the way, can be found all over Japan.