No. 9 — The monster temple

Record

At a monster temple where, generation after generation, the head priest was said to be eaten alive, a traveling monk stayed the night. In the middle of the night, a three-eyed, large-toothed nyudo appeared again and again and tried to flick at his head, so the traveling monk split its head with a piece of firewood and threw it outside. The next morning, when he examined what it truly was, he found that it had been monster, a shape that should not be, made from an old wooden clog. The traveling monk then became the head priest of the temple as he was, and put an end to the monster disturbance.

Source

Ogasawara Kenkichi (ed.), Shiwa-gun Mukashibanashi-shu (1938) — National Diet Library Digital Collections (Japanese text)

Land

Shiwa District

Type

Yokai and the Uncanny

Beings

monster

This is an English rendering of our short Japanese summary of the source tale — a summary translated from the Japanese, not a translation of the original text. The summary was drafted and translated with AI assistance, and names and numbers were checked against our records. Tale numbers for this book follow the order in which the tales appear; they are ours, not the book's.