No. 12 — Jingaoka Zaemon and Baba Matsuko
At night, the husband joked about the shape of his wife's hand, and the next morning two samurai appeared, saying they had come to take the wife away as promised. The couple was startled and consulted a priest, who saw through it as the work of a fox, a shape-shifting fox, and gave them a plan to smoke pepper husks to expose its true form. They gathered young men and waited, and when they shut the door and burned the peppers, the two samurai began to suffer and showed their fox forms, confessing that they were foxes living nearby named Jingaoka Zaemon and Baba Matsuko, and begged for their lives, promising never to deceive the villagers again, and were released.
- Land
- Shiwa District
- Beings
- fox
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.