“Alas, to have to leave this beautiful world!” he often sighed.
At which his old father would say, “Fear not, my son. By the time you are threescore years and ten you will think differently.”
But the young noble would shake his head and reply, “Nay, nay, I want to live always, always.”
One day an aged pilgrim came into Nagasaki and rested on a stone outside Vasobiove’s garden. The owner was walking under the tulip trees, and seeing the sad-looking man in the sun and dust of the road, called and bade him come into the shade of his park.
Leaning heavily upon his staff, the wanderer came and sat down beside the fountain, and the young noble asked him many a question of lands and men he had seen.
“Is it throughout the world as here in Japan,” he questioned, “that people must die even while they yearn to live?”
The aged pilgrim nodded.
“Yea,” he answered, “in all the lands through which I have journeyed. But men have told me that there is a region where death never comes.”
The young noble leaned forward eagerly. “Where is it,” he questioned, “ah, where? Tell me, for I mean to go to that land.”
The pilgrim shook his head, saying, “That you cannot do, my son. It is in the Happy Islands of Everlasting Life, but although mortals have seen them in the distance, never has one succeeded in entering there.”