Every night, Bedtime World Tour visits a different culture's oral tradition and tells one of its folktales — from the Arctic to the Amazon, East Asia to West Africa. Genuine, credited stories, retold in the same quiet, warm voice and ending not on a stated moral but on a single image to fall asleep to. Gentle enough for children, calming enough for the adults reading to them. Each episode is tagged by region and by how rare the tale is, so you always know which corner of the world you're in tonight.
Momotaro, the Peach Boy — East Asia (Well-Known) | Bedtime World Tour
The last episode of Season Two. Tonight we travel to Japan, to a village between the hills, for the story almost every child in Japan can tell you by heart. An old woman kneeling at the river sees something coming down the current toward her — a peach the size of a melon — and when she puts it on the table that evening it opens by itself. Fifteen years later the boy inside it walks out of the village with a bundle of millet dumplings, and picks up a dog, a monkey and a pheasant on the road.
A world folktale every night, told to help you fall asleep. Follow the show so tomorrow night's story finds you too.
Source & tradition: Japanese tradition. Momotarō circulated widely in the Edo period (1603–1868) in illustrated *akahon* chapbooks and in oral telling; the version that became standard is Iwaya Sazanami's literary adaptation of 1894, which was adopted into Meiji-era national school readers and largely displaced the regional variants. The tale is classed among the best-known Japanese folk narratives and is discussed in Keigo Seki's survey work on Japanese oral literature. Original prose retelling.
15 Oct 2026
The Dwarf of Uxmal | Maya Bedtime Story — Bedtime World Tour
Tonight we travel to the Yucatán, to the ruined Maya city of Uxmal and to the tallest building in it, which is shaped like nothing else the Maya ever built. An old woman with no children wraps an egg in cloth and waits, and what hatches out of it is a boy. Years later a king sets him a final test that is not really a test at all: build a house taller than my palace, in one night, or die at dawn. And in the morning the king goes to his window and cannot see the sky.
A world folktale every night, told to help you fall asleep. Follow the show so tomorrow night's story finds you too.
Source & tradition: Maya (Yucatec) tradition of the Puuc region, Yucatán, Mexico. The legend of the dwarf who built the pyramid in a single night was recorded from local tellers by the American traveller and writer John Lloyd Stephens and published in *Incidents of Travel in Yucatan* (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1843), the account of his second expedition with the artist Frederick Catherwood; the story was already long established locally when he collected it. The building, the Pyramid of the Magician (*Pirámide del Adivino*), still stands at Uxmal and is unusual among Maya pyramids for its rounded corners. Original prose retelling.
13 Oct 2026
The Doomed Prince — North Africa & Maghreb (Lesser-Known) | Bedtime World Tour
Tonight we travel back to ancient Egypt, to a story written on the back of a papyrus in the British Museum. At the prince's birth the Seven Hathors say he will die by the crocodile, the snake, or the dog, and his father builds him a stone house in the desert to keep him from all three. Then the boy goes up on the roof and sees a greyhound on the road below, and asks for one. I should say now, before we start, that this story has no ending — and I will explain why when we get there.
A world folktale every night, told to help you fall asleep. Follow the show so tomorrow night's story finds you too.
Source & tradition: Ancient Egyptian tradition, 18th–19th Dynasty. "The Tale of the Doomed Prince" survives on the verso of Papyrus Harris 500, held by the British Museum as EA 10060, written in hieratic. The papyrus was badly damaged by fire and the conclusion is lost: the text breaks off mid-sentence as the crocodile seizes the prince and the dog begins to bark, and no other copy has ever been found. Standard translation in Miriam Lichtheim, *Ancient Egyptian Literature*, vol. II: *The New Kingdom* (University of California Press, 1976), pp. 200–203. Original prose retelling; the ending is genuinely missing and this telling stops where the papyrus does rather than inventing a conclusion.
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