The Boy in the Garden

The Boy in the Garden is really two stories. One is an old folktale about a man who saved a struggling crane from a trap, met and married a young woman who made a beautiful cloth each night and who begged her husband not to look upon her while she worked, and discovered his wife was the crane he saved one night when he could not resist peeking at her while she worked. The second story is a tale of a boy and his father who go to visit a friend. The boy sees a statue of a crane and then goes inside a small cottage at the edge of the property. Soon a woman visits him. The boy believes the woman is the crane woman. The ending makes you think the boy could have been dreaming.

As always with Say stories, the illustrations are beautiful and the text has an exotic flavor.