Kakurezato is that ideal place where one is not easily noticed, i.e. the home of the recluse. It is a motif in the tales of the strange and marvelous in the early modern period and often described as the locus of a story\u27s action. For example, Kakurezato by the representative kanazôshi writer Asai Ryôi in Otogibôko, "Yumeji no Kazaguruma-Kakurezato" by the representative ukiyozôshi writer Ihara Saikaku in Shokoku Banashi. Going even further back one can also offer the seventeenth-century work kakurezato.How did this idea come to be conceived? What are its origins? In this paper I will compare the special characteristics of the description of kakurezato with the contest of various Chinese accounts of the same. For example, to that in China\u27s oldest novel about a god-like recluse , Liexian zhuan, by the Han dynast y writer, Liu Xiang ; to the cave of the recluse as described in shiyiji by Wang Jia, a Daoist of the jin dynasty; and also the Daoist scriptures , Ziyang zhenren zhuan Zhengao, and Tiandigongfutu. I will point out that kakurezato is a motif received from the Chinese Daoist tradition of cave dwelling as an ideal. In addition, by means of a careful examination of Otogibôko and Shokoku Banashi I would like to examine the reception and transformation of the image of the immortal recluse as it appears in the cave-dwelling ideal of early modern tales of the strange and marvelous.Finally I would like to consider those passages in the Nihon Shoki which have a bearing on the cave-dwelling ideal, the books (use of good editions, manuscript copies) of Asai Ryôi which deal with Chinese popular Daoism , connections with Honchô Ressenden , which Ihara Saikaku had published at about the same time as Shokoku Banashi and which has a particularly Daoist cast, and illustrations of recluses , as well as the process of transmission to Japan of the Daoist cave-dwelling ideal, its relationship to Ryôi and Saikaku\u27s Daoism, and the interest in Daoism of those for whom these tales of the strange and marvelous were written, the readers of the Edo period
