It's a long way from home, but this bucolic island of gingerbread cottages and rolling green hills is where generations of Japanese girls have dreamed of getting married, or of simply visiting before they die.

As adults, they come by the thousands every year, a few with their hair dyed red and tied in pigtails just like Anne Shirley, the heroine of ''Anne of Green Gables,'' Lucy Maud Montgomery's novel about the irrepressible orphan from the fictional town of Avonlea.

Many of these pilgrims break into tears of joy when they visit the house in Clifton, the town where Montgomery was born. They often seem to make no distinction between the author and her creation.

At Green Gables, the Victorian house and farm here that inspired the 1908 book, representations of Anne's favorite dress and the writing slate she broke over a boy's head after he teased her in school elicit oohs and aahs from the tourists who arrive daily by the busload.