The Restaurant of Many Orders

I recently had to read an old fairy tale for an advanced Japanese level class that I am taking here at IUS, and I found the moral of the story to be very interesting and unique. It did remind me of some of the fairy tales that I had read as a child, but this one still has a very distinct theme, in which was presented to me in a manner that I had not experienced before. This will now explain the story behind the old Japanese fairy tale The Restaurant of Many Orders, and of the theme embedded within the story.

The story starts off with two men that are being guided around the country side by a tour guide. The men are also occupied by their two dogs, and later become seperated from them and the tour guide. Hungry, the men start to panic and become lost. They later come across a restaurant in the middle of the forest. They think that it is really odd that a restaurant would be in the middle of the forest, but they still decide to enter. They are drawn in by a sign that mentions that they can eat for free, that they can even eat as much as they like. The men then decide to go inside the restaurant, and are later engaged by many odd signs inside the restaurant. These signs are posted on doors, and usually ask them to remove items such as their weapons and clothes. The men believe that this is because the restaurant hosts men of high status, and that this is a simply a security measure. Ultimately, they obey the signs, and the sign requests become stranger and stranger, with one sign even asking them to put butter all over their bodies. Later they discover that they are to be eaten by a giant cat, but their dogs come in at the last second and scare the cat away.

What one learns from this simple, yet unique fairy tale, is that if something is to good to be true, then maybe it really is too good to be true.