Fairy tales about the sea

The Little Mermaid begins deeper than any anchor rope can reach, in a coral palace with amber windows. Each princess may swim up to the surface at fifteen, and on the youngest one’s first evening up there a storm breaks a ship apart and she holds a drowning prince above the waves.

Urashima Taro is a young fisherman who buys a tortoise from boys tormenting it on the beach and sets it free. Later the tortoise swims up to his boat and carries him on its back to the palace of the Dragon King of the Sea, where the gatekeeper is a fish.

In Sinbad the Sailor a becalmed ship stops beside a small island as green as a meadow. The crew go ashore and light a fire, and the island shudders and sinks, because it is a whale. Sinbad is left alone on the open sea, holding on to a plank, and his voyage has only just begun.

In The Fisherman and His Wife the sea keeps count. Each time the man goes back to the flounder to ask for more, the water looks worse: green and yellow, then purple and gray, then black and boiling, until a storm rolls rocks into the waves. Children like to guess the color before you read it.