the story of a spider

So last night I was talking with Tomoko and somehow the topic of cultural images of animals (and insects) came up. And somehow, we ended up talking about spiders, which reminded me of Anansi the spider. I asked her if there were any famous legends about spiders, and she told me this one:

Once upon a time, there was a very evil man. He did lots of horrible and bad things, including theft and murder. There was only one redeeming deed in his whole life, and that was that once he saved the life of a spider. Eventually, he died and he went to hell.

He suffered in hell for awhile...something about a pool of blood. The spider eventually died too, but since the spider was a good spider, it went to heaven. The spider looked down from heaven at hell and saw its once upon a time benefactor. Taking pity on him, the spider asked Buddha to allow him to come to heaven. Based on the spider's strong recommendation, Buddha decided to allow the evil man one last chance. So, the spider began to spin its silk, so much that it fell all the way from heaven down to hell. The evil man found the spider silk and began to climb up the silk to enter heaven. He was almost all the way up when he looked down behind him and realized that many other denizens of hell were also climbing up the spider silk. He was afraid that the silk would break before he reached heaven, so he cut it, letting everybody else tumble back to hell. Alas, Buddha was watching him and seeing him act so selfishly, cut the spider silk above him. He had squandered his last chance, and so he fell back into hell for all of eternity.

Apparently the story may be by Akutagawa Ryunosuke. I will have to look it up...though I am warned that it is difficult. But I love these sorts of fairy tales and parables. Simple and elegant.


On a totally unrelated note, I had another dance lesson today. I finally finished learning all of my dance, Gion kouta (Ballad of Gion, or Little Song of Gion). The last section is really complicated, with me turning this way and that. Hopefully I can remember! Since I finally learned what the name of my dance was, of course the first thing I did was Google it. Unfortunately, I found at least three other versions of the dance, and innumerable midi files of the song. At least now I know the lyrics!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRPRWZLXlI4

Here is a version of the dance for an idea of what it sounds like and what this type of dancing looks like (though mine is faster and the song is not a solo version).

I'm going to perform in February!