Mr Nobeyama was an astronaut.
One evening, from the high altitude of 20,000 kilometres, he was busy setting his camera to point towards Earth.
There was going to be a meteor shower and it was Mr Nobeyama’s job to film it.

（1） However, the meteor shower simply would not come.
Mr Nobeyama slurped his bland astronaut’s ramen noodles in order to stay awake.
At that moment, a bright flash of light whizzed right by his spaceship.
Mr Nobeyama threw his ramen noodles into the air and hurried to press the switch on the video camera.
The flash of light was headed straight for the far away Earth which was covered in thick, black smog.

（2） Mr Nobeyama thought that the meteor shower would follow, but there were no more flashes of light.
He was once again surrounded by deep darkness.
‘What? Just one...?’
Mr Nobeyama was disappointed. He grabbed the cup of ramen noodles which was floating in mid-air.
‘Still, that was a really big meteor!’ he thought.

（3） Beep, beep, beep, beep...
The spaceship’s monitor displayed the image of the meteor which had just been taken. Upon seeing the image, Mr Nobeyama, who was drinking the remaining ramen soup through a straw, once again threw the cup in the air in surprise. What was shown on the monitor was no meteor. It was a single bird, the like of which he had never seen before.

（4） It was a golden bird.
‘This is ridiculous,’ thought Mr Nobeyama. ‘There’s no way that a bird could fly in space...’
He shook his head vigorously and quickly sent the image to Headquarters on Earth.
‘This image is of a meteor headed for Earth at 0430 GMT. Please identify it for me.’

（5） Just as Mr Nobeyama finally finished his ramen noodles, the reply came from Earth.
‘We did not detect that meteor from Earth. It must have been flying off its expected path.’
‘And what do you make of the bird which can be seen in the light?’ asked Mr Nobeyama.
‘There’s nothing there,’ came the blunt reply.

（6） ‘That’s not possible...’
Mr Nobeyama rewound the tape and displayed the meteor on the monitor. To his utmost surprise, there was nothing left of the bird which had surely been there moments ago.
‘Was it just my imagination? No... but... maybe it was...’

（7） The meteor shower was taking a long time to appear.
Mr Nobeyama became incredibly sleepy.
‘Let me just lie down for a bit...’
Mr Nobeyama was the only astronaut on the spaceship so he could not pass the job on to anybody else.
He set the camera to automatic mode and lay down on the bed next to it.

（8） How comfortable the bed was! Astronauts must spend all their time operating countless machines, all day and night. It is very tiring work.
Mr Nobeyama snored like a steam train as he sunk into a deep sleep.

（9） At that very moment, a mysterious message was being sent to the spaceship:
‘I am the one who intercepted the signal you sent to Earth. There certainly is a bird in the picture you took of the meteor. But that bird is not one which is found on Earth. That bird, which belongs to the family of the sacred birds is, without doubt, the Makafushigi. It is a kind of sandpiper which was written about by Greek naturalist Norasteldamas, 200 years before Christ.’

（10） ‘Norasteldamas had the following to say about the bird:
“When the Makafushigi comes down from Heaven, it will bring countless changes to Earth. And when the bird leaves Earth, humans will lose their most important　friends. Understand that this is punishment for how badly humans have treated Earth.”’
There was a copy of an ancient illustration of the Makafushigi at the end of the e-mail.

（11） Mr Nobeyama, of course, knew nothing of this as he slept with his mouth wide open and drooling, dreaming of sushi, eel rice bowls, oden, salmon chazuke and all the other food he could not eat in space.
It was at this time that, on the far away Earth, unbelievable things began to happen just as Norasteldamas had said they would.

（12） In the Polish countryside, school teacher Joseph Klausner had just woken up and was going to feed his green turtle in its tank when he was suddenly frozen with shock.
His little green turtle, Maria, had grown eyebrows!
As the surprised Joseph watched, a thick beard began to grow around Maria’s mouth who then started a speech:
‘Comrades! Arise!’

（13） The next person to notice a change was Julio Cervantes, a librarian and goldfish owner in Madrid, Spain.
As he did every morning, Julio said
‘Good morning!’
to his fancy telescope eye goldfish which he was very proud of. As soon as he said this, however, he dropped his dentures in surprise.
The black goldfish had grown pink arms and legs and was swimming breaststroke in the tank. Not only that, it soon began swimming through the air and flew away through the open window.

（14） Shankar, who worked in forestry in India, had just gone to the elephant pen where he kept elephants to help carry the palm trees he chopped down.
‘Oh no! I can’t believe it!’
He could be heard to yell in Hindi.
The elephants all had their noses and tails swapped around and were drinking from their tails while wagging their noses.

（15） At a zoo in Sichuan Province in China, Chen was the zoo keeper in charge of looking after the pandas. As he always did, he brought a bundle of bamboo leaves into the panda cage. What he saw there was not the animal he was used to seeing.
It took Chen some time to realise what was different. The black and white colours of the panda were the wrong way around.

（16） It was not just the pandas this had happened to. In the Ural Mountains in Russia, Ivan Wronski, an animal investigator, was attacked by an animal he had never seen before.
He barely escaped alive by climbing a tree. He looked down at the animal and saw it looked like a tiger. The tiger’s black and orange stripes, however, had been switched around.

（17） Speaking of tigers, the lions were undergoing changes, too.
At around the same time at the Ngorongoro Zoological Park in Africa, a strange animal suddenly appeared. It was completely covered in thick hair.
It tried to hunt deer, but its legs got trapped in its own hair and it could not run. Ngai Wakimari, the zoologist, investigated the animal and discovered that it was a lion whose mane had spread all over its body.

（18） Something odd was happening on the Amazon River in Brazil in South America, too.
Pedro Lopes, a fisherman, was setting out on his boat as he always did. He noticed that the alligators which usually gathered in the cove were all gone today.
He found this strange and looked around. That was when he noticed that the alligators had all climbed trees and were singing songs together.

（19） In Tokyo Bay in Japan, Kotaro Tanaka, who was investigating sea pollution, came across the following unbelievable sight.
One after another, shellfish started to jump free from the thick sludge at the bottom of the bay. Oysters, clams, mussels... all the different shellfish flapped their shells in their own ways, breaking free of the sludge and gliding up through the sea.
They looked just like butterflies.

（20） People out on the sea all around the world gasped in amazement.
Sea turtles, ocean sunfish, sharks, whales, manta rays, sea lions, seals... all of the animals living in the sea starting flapping their fins and flying up into the sky.
It was the little flying fish, though, who was the biggest showoff.

（21） Something particularly amazing was happening in the Arizona Desert in the United States of America.
John Carpenter was an archaeologist who was digging for dinosaur bones. He fainted in shock when he saw bones stir from the sand all around him and quickly come together to form a dinosaur.

（22） ‘Oh dear!’
Mr Nobeyama finished eating his salmon chazuke in his dream and immediately woke up.
He hurried to look out of the spaceship window.
That was when he saw an unbelievable sight.

（23） It was a dizzyingly impressive meteor shower.
And it looked to be heading out from Earth into space, rather than towards Earth.
Still not having read the mysterious message, Mr Nobeyama had no idea that this meteor shower was ‘man’s most important friends’ abandoning Earth.
The meteors were, in fact, all the animals of Earth besides the humans.

（24） After the meteor shower passed, Earth became a dull, grey colour.
Next, twisty legs began to grow from Earth.
As Mr Nobeyama watched, Earth transformed into a giant octopus (patterned like a world map!) and shot off into space with a great blast of ink.
Mr Nobeyama hurried to chase after the octopus.
A new line had been added to the previous message:
‘By the time you have realised, it is too late. Norasteldamas.’

(The End)

6 A Mysterious Tale

Anthology of 7 Japanese Children's Stories
(Japanese-English Bilingual Picture Book)

『日本（にほん）の童話（どうわ）』 全（ぜん）7話（わ） 第（だい）6話（わ） マカフシギ物語（ものがたり） (英語（えいご）) 準拠（じゅんきょ）

作（さく） 舟崎（ふなざき）　克彦（よしひこ）・三間（みま）　由紀子（ゆきこ）
絵（え） 舟崎（ふなざき）　克彦（よしひこ）
翻訳（ほんやく） Ash SPREADBURY
朗読（ろうどく） Eda STERNER KANEKO

制作（せいさく） NPO法人（ほうじん） 地球（ちきゅう）ことば村（むら）・世界（せかい）言語（げんご）博物（はくぶつ）館（かん）

2021.2.6