Green Willow

A young samurai escorting a lord's daughter falls for a girl who lives with her parents beside a willow tree — a girl bound to that tree in a way he does not learn until it is too late to matter. A dead woman visits her lover every night carrying a peony-shaped lantern, and neither of them will admit, until the very end, what that means for him. A fisherman on the shore watches a robe of feathers fall from the sky and, without meaning to, strands an angel on the earth. And a fox who lived a thousand years, wore the faces of empresses, and nearly brought down a throne, kneels at last before a single old priest. Retold by an Englishwoman raised in Tokyo — first published 1910, reprinted here chapter by chapter, public domain in the United States, house account Enishio Classics.